There was no trace of Trevor.
I tried to shake a strong feeling of unfinished business. In hoarse, truncated shouts, Lyle and I fleshed out the case against Trevor Dunnaway during that bumpy and tense flight to the Coast Guard station.
Lyle started it, putting me on the spot. “Burton was dead. He didn’t tell you a damned thing. So how’d you know Trevor bashed him?”
The helicopter lurched, the noise made my ears ache. “Burton either knew something about those shots at Chase …” I paused, then lifted my voice again. “… or he fired them in collusion with somebody. In the first instance, his instinct would be to tell somebody. He would have trusted only two people. If it was the second case, only the same two could have been collaborators.”
Lyle saw it at once, and I had a new appreciation of his perceptiveness. He leaned close, yelled in my ear. “Yeah, sure. The shooting alibied you and Trevor. So Burton would feel safe in going to either one of you. And that’s true of the second proposition: the only people who gained anything from the shooting were you and Trevor. You were automatically eliminated from the list of suspects when Chase was killed.”
The sky was heavy with clouds all around us now. The helicopter wobbled from the buffeting of the wind.
“So what’s the truth—was Burton a good little fellow trying to report to somebody he trusted or was he involved in a plan to kill Chase?”
We didn’t solve that.
But, yelling until we were hoarse, we came up with some plausible ideas, with a lot of conjecture thrown in:
That investigation would reveal Trevor to be involved in some kind of illegality within the Prescott empire.
That Trevor had used his own hair dryer in a kind of double bluff, counting on the fact that he was alibied during the shooting incident to eliminate him as a suspect in Chase’s murder.
That Trevor and Burton had been in collusion, Trevor persuading Burton to plant the box of marzipan and to shoot at Chase, missing him, of course, in some kind of elaborate scheme to persuade Chase to trust Trevor and be suspicious of Lyle and Roger. Obviously, it had required collusion because Trevor hadn’t been present at the brownstone that weekend.
That’s as far as we’d gotten when we reached the air station.
And that’s about as far as the investigating authorities, which would include the local sheriffs office, Lloyd’s of London, and the private detectives hired by Roger, ever got when all was reported.
The aftermath revealed that Trevor had indeed been involved in the illegal transfer of monies within Prescott Communications to stave off financial collapse.
Some wondered how Trevor had managed to keep his chicanery from Chase. They speculated that Trevor had been forced to kill Chase before the huge interest payments came due October 1 and that Trevor had intended to replace the illegally used funds with the huge chunk of money Lloyd’s owed on the policy insuring Chase against murder. And, in fact, the insurance money did indeed make it possible to save Prescott Communications from bankruptcy.
The press, including all the newspapers and television stations within Prescott Communications, played the story to the hilt. Face it, there is nothing the press enjoys more than a good murder.
This murder had every element necessary to win 48-point heads across the country:
A murdered magnate dispatched in an imaginative way. (Hot tub companies cringed.) The accompanying Hawaiian music was an added fillip.
A gorgeous young widow who had lain perilously near death for days, affording the opportunity for running updates on Miranda’s condition and the joyous relief when she survived undamaged. Much was written about her passionate love for her older husband. No one called it obsession. As it was. I felt certain that it was she who’d searched my room that first afternoon. At least she’d found nothing there to break her heart. But I wondered if she would ever be at peace.
An island kingdom, cut off from the world, steeped in luxury, doomed to sudden destruction. The newspapers carried elaborate architectural renderings, interviews with the interior-design firm, even a description of the room-size refrigerator where Chase had lain until the building succumbed to the storm. This made it possible to speculate on what had happened to his body and ditto that of his murderer, Trevor Dunnaway.
A killer hurricane that ravaged the coast with two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds, prompting a massive but successful evacuation of several hundred thousand residents, including the gallant rescue of those stranded on Dead Man’s Island. The press, of course, relished the old name for the island. Spin-off stories included comparisons with previous hurricanes and the all-time death toll in the great Galveston storm, long before weather services could warn of impending danger.
The courageous and strikingly handsome stepson who had risked his life on a frail homemade raft to seek rescue for those in peril.
The famous actress who had faced death with aplomb.
The enigmatic manservant who had been arrested as he tried to leave the Coast Guard air station. (A tip, investigators said later. It was easy enough for me to pass a note to the co-pilot saying Enrique was wearing a body belt packed with cocaine. But more about that later.)
The grief-stricken son who had held a press conference to announce his intent to honor his late father’s memory by directing Prescott Communications to vigorously pursue investigative reporting to root out malfeasance in office, desecration of the environment, financial fraud, the inadequate response of society to the mentally ill, drug and alcohol addiction, the insurance scandal in medicine, and children who lived in poverty.
The urbane and charming murderer was the subject of lengthy articles based on interviews with his friends and professional associates.
It afforded the juiciest peek into the world of the rich since the Claus von Billow trial.
And a spate of articles on the retired newspaperwoman turned suspense novelist, Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins. Some old friends, no doubt, were a bit surprised by my willingness to serve as a news source. But I know my fellow reporters: a fed dog doesn’t scratch to dig up bones. I was quite willing to play raconteur to focus the reporters’ attention on me today and not on my past.
The sensation finally subsided, of course.
The facts about the murder of Chase Prescott provided one of the premier news stories of the decade.
But it wasn’t the true story.
16
One fact was evident.
Trevor Dunnaway had struck down Burton Andrews.
But, as we spun our theories during that helicopter ride, I was never fully satisfied with our reconstruction of the crimes.
It made sense, yes.
But there were still loose ends.
Who had destroyed the Miranda B.? Certainly there was no rational reason for Trevor to have marooned himself on the island.
I asked Roger to hire the private detectives. I set them to work scouring the county for purchasers of dynamite, especially those who had bought only a few sticks.
It was easier than I’d expected.
Frank Hudson, who’d taken me over to Prescott Island the day I arrived, claimed he had bought the dynamite to rid his land of some tree stumps. Ultimately, a jury didn’t believe him, especially when the sheriff’s office did excellent work in identifying some flotsam from the explosion that the storm had deposited inland and a forensic chemist testified that the Miranda B.’s porthole had been damaged by a dynamite blast. Testimony underscored Hudson’s intense hatred for Chase Prescott and how Hudson believed his family’s island had been stolen by Chase.
So the explosion was separate from the murders. The explosion was the act of an angry, vengeful man who had spied an opportunity to repay the Prescotts for taking what Hudson saw as his own, Dead Man’s Island.
That simplified the equation. I thought that would satisfy my niggling sense that something was off-key.
And I was delighted when the news broke that Enrique’s arrest had smashed a powerful smuggling ring. Enrique had
removed a shipment of cocaine from the Miranda B. when it went in for its annual overhaul. He had had the drug shipment on the island. When the hurricane was imminent, he had hurried to the servants’ quarters to get the shipment.
Chase had been clever but not clever enough to realize that his longtime employee had used the Miranda B. to smuggle huge quantities of cocaine. Later investigation revealed that Enrique owned a mansion in Bolivia and that the garage at his by-no-means-modest home in Miami harbored a Jaguar and a Rolls-Royce.
Rosalia wasn’t implicated. Roger helped her obtain counseling and a new life where Enrique or his agents would never find her.
At my direction the private detective investigated everyone, so I learned all about Betty’s family: her daughter, Mary, who had lost her job at the jeans factory and had no health insurance and couldn’t pay the bills when her little girl, Alice, became severely diabetic with all the treatment and expense that entails.
Betty desperately needed money to save the life of her only grandchild. And for years she’d resented Chase’s treatment of Carrie Lee Prescott. So she had found it easy to meet secretly with Jeremy Hubbard and provide all those damning and quite true stories about Chase and his family for the unauthorized biography that had created such nasty headlines.
That should have answered all my questions. But still …
Perhaps I’ve covered too many stories, asked too many questions. Deep inside I knew it wasn’t over. Yet. For me.
Not even when I finally came homes, more than a week later. I walked into the house and realized this was how it had begun for me.
Coming home, and a telephone call.
And there on the bed were my pictures of Richard and Emily. I gave a little salute to Richard’s portrait, a good one that recalled his broad, open face, reddish-brown hair, and green eyes. And that familiar crooked grin.
I dropped my suitcase and carry-on and picked up the photograph of Emily.
The phone rang.
My heart lifted as I recognized her voice. “Hello, love. Yes, I’m glad to be home.”
Emily had a lot of questions about my ordeal.
I answered so carefully.
Too carefully.
“Mother, what’s wrong?” My daughter has an uncanny way of sensing when I’m not being absolutely open with her. She is utterly ruthless in prizing out the truth. “Mother, are you all right?” A definite note of suspicion.
“Of course. Just a little frustrated. I’m behind. I need to get started on the new book—and I don’t even have an idea yet.” I carried the phone outside and settled beside the pond. Sunlight splashed on the portrait I still held.
“Oh.” Her relief was evident. “You always feel that way in the beginning. The book will come.”
There’s nothing quite so irritating to an author as a family member’s easy confidence that, of course, the book will come.
I snapped, “It’s like trying to chip an idea out of concrete. Nothing’s coming!”
“It will, it will. Probably you’re still emotionally involved with that island. But the excitement’s dying down. It won’t be news much longer, then it will be easier for you to forget.”
Forget?
No, I wouldn’t forget.
I managed to divert Emily, to turn the conversation to her work.
I didn’t ever want to talk to Emily about Chase and what had happened and why.
So I suppose it’s understandable that when our conversation ended, my thoughts turned to Chase. I sat quietly on the rustic bench, Emily’s picture in my lap, and surveyed the garden. Not my garden, of course. I have no green thumb, and I’ve never lighted long enough in one spot to invest myself in plants. But this house came with a dreamily gorgeous backyard that includes a weeping willow-shrouded pond with a rock fountain in the center.
I welcomed the September warmth, the occasional wafting past of glorious Monarchs on their way to Mexico, and the musical splash from the fountain.
And I stopped avoiding thoughts about Chase. Perhaps I’d never be free of those traumatic days until I permitted myself to grieve. Fragments of memory slipped and slid across the surface of my mind as I watched the water trickling down and around the mossy gray rocks, so artfully constructed to look like a miniature mountain range.
I thought of Chase’s unexpected telephone call and that instantly familiar voice, with its unfamiliar undercurrent of desperation.
Desperation?
Yes. Looking back, I realized Chase had been fiercely determined to persuade me to come to his island, that it was of paramount importance to him. Of course, it had all been prearranged, the guest list carefully devised so that I could play detective, identify the person who’d attempted to poison him.
He’d brilliantly played every card he’d had to enlist my aid. I suppose he knew that I’d never shed the guilt of leaving, all those years ago.
He’d subtly taken advantage of that.
A wisp of wind stirred my hair. It had just the faintest undertone of fall in it, the first hint of chill.
Like the chill that edged into my heart, remembering Chase and that phone call.
Yes, he’d played his cards beautifully. But was I surprised? I’d always known what Chase was like. Determined to win—always—no matter what the cost, no matter who was hurt, no matter …
Chase’s character.
And Burton’s character.
Burton, so terrified of being blamed for doing something wrong.
I curled my fingers around the metal arm of the bench, welcoming the warmth trapped in the iron curve.
I needed warmth because I was seeing and thinking now with a cold clarity.
I should have seen it from the very first.
One piece of poisoned candy.
Shots. Swift, carefully aimed shots.
The electricity turned off on Thursday night so that the hair dryer could not only be put in place but plugged in. That was when the killer returned to the generator and turned it back on—to make certain that the plugged-in dryer wouldn’t trip the circuit breaker. The near encounter with me must have been nerve-racking indeed. But I’d run to safety. So then all that remained was to go to the pool, go into the cabana, trip the breaker to that line, go outside, unplug the dryer, reset the breaker. The trial run was over. Now it was certain—once the hair dryer was plugged in—that anyone entering the hot tub would be immediately, efficiently, swiftly electrocuted; there would be no tripped breaker to frustrate the planned electrocution.
And that was what had happened.
But another element to the plan was crucial to its success: those shots aimed at Chase. I’d sensed that—but not quite understood why.
What did the shots accomplish?
They gave me and Trevor an alibi. This was essential. Because obviously Trevor was part of the scheme.
What did Burton tell me about the shots?
There was an unmistakable ring of truth in his voice when he said, almost tauntingly, “I didn’t see anybody shoot at Chase.”
But after Chase’s death Burton worried about it. And he decided, because he wasn’t a part of the plan, that he should tell someone.
Who?
Someone in authority, obviously. Someone who could tell Burton what he should do.
Why did he choose Trevor? Not, as I had thought, because Trevor had an alibi for the gunshots. That didn’t figure at all. Burton was still close to Chase’s influence. Chase didn’t confide in Roger about business. Burton didn’t like Lyle. But Trevor—Trevor was Chase’s main adviser.
So Burton made his decision. He would tell Trevor.
That signed his death warrant.
Because Trevor couldn’t afford to have anyone know that no one had shot at Chase.
I gripped the bench rail so hard my hand ached.
Why, oh, why, hadn’t I seen it from the first?
I didn’t need an alibi. Trevor was the one to be alibied. His alibi was his price for cooperating with Chase in Chase’s dark a
nd final plan.
Who planned the island gathering?
Who was determined—always—to triumph?
Who said he would rather die than see his empire destroyed?
Who knew better than anyone that the Lloyd’s of London money would save Prescott Communications?
And who knew better than anyone how exhaustively insurance companies investigate those kinds of death claims?
So who poisoned that candy?
Chase.
Who shot the gun on the sunny point that morning?
Chase.
That’s what Burton saw. That’s what he knew.
That’s why Burton had to die. Because everything Chase did was known to Trevor. And Trevor had to agree with Chase’s desperate scheme because he was in it up to his neck in the misuse of vast sums of monies in a desperate attempt to save Prescott Communications. Trevor knew only the Lloyd’s policy would be enough to save them. There was no financing waiting in the wings. If Lloyd’s disallowed the policy on the basis that Chase’s death was suicide, not murder, all would be lost. Trevor had to have the proceeds from Lloyd’s.
So, with a high degree of efficiency and brilliance, Chase Prescott engineered his own murder. He didn’t care about the misery it would cause those left behind as suspects. He wanted suspects. He wanted the hunt for a murderer to continue. It had to be murder, and Chase didn’t care what it cost either his family or his associates so long as Prescott Communications, the one thing he had loved on this earth, survived.
Now I knew.
What could I do?
What should I do?
If I made this claim, I had not a shred of evidence to back it up.
Knowledge of a man’s character isn’t enough in a court of law.
The insurance company would be delighted and would resist the claim.
But it came down to no proof.
Still, wasn’t it my duty to press to see that the truth came out?
An idealist would choose truth.
A realist would gauge whether the revelation would have any practical effect.
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