DES LAY THERE STARING at the ceiling while the four Spice Girls chased each other blissfully around the bed, scampering over her, rumbling, tumbling. Their energy was boundless. So was their ability to amuse themselves. Their whole universe was right here inside this house. And, within its carpeted confines, they were totally content.
Damn, she envied them sometimes.
She had not been asleep when Mitch Berger called, even though she’d been awake nearly forty-eight hours straight and her body was exhausted. But she could not shut down her mind. It had kept right on searching and rewinding. Sorting through Big Sister’s residents, one by one. Reviewing what she knew about them. Focusing on what she didn’t know. And now she had a new fact to throw into the mix: Someone had tried to take out Mitch Berger.
Why? How did eliminating him link up to the three murders? Was Mandy responsible for it? If so, why had she let him leave her place alive tonight? How did that make any sense?
Des lay there, wondering. Same as she wondered how that man knew what she was wearing at this very moment.
Sighing, she reached for the phone again and dialed the number she knew so well. It rang twice before she heard the familiar rumbling voice at the other end.
“I need to see you,” she said, instead of hello.
“I’ll put the coffee on,” he said, instead of good-bye.
There had never been any wasted words between the two of them.
Des dressed hurriedly. Every cat in the house assumed it was happy meal fun time-if she was up, then that spelled food. Not knowing when she’d be back again, she gave in to them. Working her way from room to room, bowl to bowl, stepping her way patiently through her furry entourage. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, her mud room resident, was in particularly cheery form at two A.M.-he merely glowered at her, a low, baleful moan coming from deep down in his throat.
Des had half a mind to stuff him in a carrier and drop him on Mandy Havenhurst’s doorstep with a short, sweet message taped to his chest: “From me to you, bitch.”
She paused in her studio to examine the sketch she’d started working on before she went to bed. It was a sketch of Mitch Berger. She’d cut his grainy black-and-white photograph out of the Hartford Courant, pinned it to the easel and studied it long and hard. Then she’d drawn what she had seen. Reducing him to shadows and shapes. Abstracting him, deconstructing him, finding him. Now she unclipped the portrait and slid it into her portfolio.
Then she grabbed her keys and jumped in her slicktop, steering it down Hemlock Hollow in the silent darkness to Amity Road, which took her to the Wilbur Cross Parkway. She headed in the direction of New Britain, the home of Stanley Tools and the Pontiac Trans Am capital of Southern New England. Des didn’t know if there was any connection between these two facts. Probably. There were a few overnight truckers out on the road, flying. Her presence there slowed them right on down, since absolutely nobody in the state of Connecticut drove an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria sedan except for a trooper. When somebody spotted her, they eased right off the gas. If she slowed to 30 in a 65 mph zone, they would, too. No one dared pass her. No one.
Kensington, her destination, was a working-class suburb of the Hardware City. The small, neat house was located in a neighborhood of small, neat houses belonging to school teachers, nurses, postal workers and other hardworking people.
Strivers Row, Brandon used to call it mockingly.
Des knew it simply as the place where she had been raised.
The porch light was on. And Buck Mitry was seated at the kitchen table in his flannel bathrobe, patiently drinking his coffee. He was good for ten or twelve cups a day. Used to be a heavy smoker as well, but gave that up as a twenty-fifth anniversary present to Des’s mother, who had then proceeded to leave him for her high school sweetheart, an Allstate claims adjustor down in Augusta, Georgia. “I am reborn,” she had told Des at the wedding. “I have rediscovered laughter and joy.” Buck remained behind in the house alone-like father, like daughter. He was a big, rangy man with a furrowed brow, graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses. His hands were immense and blunt-fingered. He had been a fine athlete as a young man, even played first base in the Cleveland Indians organization for two years out of high school until he met Des’s mother and decided to get serious. He took the state police exam in 1968, when they happened to be looking for a few good, black troopers. He had risen slowly but steadily through the ranks. And now, at age fifty-six, he was the deputy superintendent-the highest-ranking black man in the history of the state. He got there by being honest, steady and careful. He got there by getting along. No flash, no dash. Buck Mitry believed in proper procedure. He believed in saying please and thank you. He believed in shined shoes, muted ties and dignified charcoal-gray suits. He owned eight such suits, all identical. Always, he had been guarded with his emotions. Des, who was his only child, had never once seen her father lose control of his temper. To the best of her knowledge, no one else had either.
That was why they called him the Deacon.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said to him, hands on her hips, “but isn’t that the same robe I gave you for Christmas back when I was twelve?”
“Quality never wears out,” he said, smiling at her faintly. “You got a cold?”
“Allergy.”
“Sounds like a cold.”
“It’s an allergy.”
She kissed him on the forehead and poured herself some coffee and sat down opposite him, hearing steady, determined crunching noises coming from the direction of the back door. Cagney and Lacey, the two stray cats Des had talked him into adopting, were nose down in their kibble bowls. They, too, thought it was time for breakfast.
“Why’d you go and do that to your hair?” he asked, eyeing her dreadlocks critically. “What is it, some kind of a statement?”
“No statement. It’s just hair.”
“Doesn’t look professional,” he grumbled at her. “And the powers that be think you’ve become a Rastafarian.”
“They are seriously behind the times.”
“They are in charge.”
“It’s just hair,” Des repeated, louder this time.
“So why don’t you wear it normal?”
“This is normal, Daddy. The Anita Hill look was chemicals. And when my head looked like the business end of a felt-tip marking pen, that was chemicals, too. Now I look like me. And it’s my head, thank you, so let’s just drop the subject, okay?”
They dropped it, Des gazing across the table at him in anxious silence. The two of them were not especially close. No one ever got close to the Deacon, not even Des’s mother. If she had she wouldn’t have fled elsewhere in search of joy.
“If this about Captain Polito I can’t help you, Desiree,” he spoke up. “Polito runs his own squad his own way. And if he wants to bring in further supervisory manpower, that’s his business.”
“That’s not why I needed to see you,” she said quietly.
He sat back in his chair, big hands folded before him on the table, waiting for her to continue.
She took a sip of her coffee, followed by a deep breath. “I want to see Crowther.”
His eyes widened at the mention of the one man, the only man in the Connecticut State Police who outranked him-Superintendent John Crowther. “What about?”
“Some unanswered questions from his past.”
“Which unanswered questions, girl?” he asked sternly. “And don’t you be giving me any double-talk. I want it straight up. I want it specific.”
“The Weems murder-suicide on Big Sister Island thirty years ago. Crowther was the investigating officer.”
“So…?”
“So the bodies were found by a seventeen-year-old girl named Dolly Peck who had recently been forcibly raped by the male victim. So this girl’s grandfather happened to be a U.S. senator. So this girl now goes by the name Dolly Seymour and is smack dab in the middle of three more murders that practically have me chewing my own foot off. She’s the linchpin, Daddy, then and now. I’ve been looking through Crowther’s official bio. The man’s career just took off after the Weems case. He went from sergeant to captain in the blink of an eye. I am talking zooom. And it so happens that his report is full of holes. So is Dolly Seymour’s memory-she claims to remember nothing of what happened that day. I have to find out what he left out.”
He got up and refilled his cup, his face stony. “You want to rattle the man’s cage, is that it?”
“Absolutely not. I could care less about the politics. All I care about is this investigation. Here and now. What’s happening now isn’t adding up. If I can find out what really went down thirty years ago, maybe it will.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“I am under the gun. I need results. I can’t help it if the trail leads me to him, can I?”
He considered this for a long moment before he said, “Have you gone through Polito on this?”
She ducked her head, her mouth tightening.
“Uh-hunh,” he grunted. “Because he’d tell you to drop it. And that’s exactly what I’m telling you to do. Don’t go there. You don’t accuse the superintendent of falsifying a report and concealing information. You’d be committing political suicide.”
“I told you, this isn’t about politics.”
“Girl, everything is about politics,” he said, shaking his head at her. “That is the reality of the situation. And if you don’t accept it you will get ground into dust. Crowther is one tough SOB. You do not want to go one-on-one with him. What do you think is going to happen-you’ll twitch your fine tail at him and the man will spill something he’s been holding onto since Richard Nixon was in the White House?”
Des could feel her face burning now. She said nothing.
“Do you honestly think he’s going to jeopardize his whole career to help you put away a rich white woman he didn’t put away thirty years ago? Not a chance. All that’ll happen is you will make yourself one powerful enemy. Probably end up back in uni, staked out at a speed trap outside of Killingley. Is that what you want? Explain yourself, girl. What is going on here?”
Des got up and went over to the sink, aware of his eyes on her. Clearly, he was baffled by her. She had never given him much reason to be. She had always been the good daughter. Good grades. Good manners. Never got into drugs. Never brought home a thug. Hell, her idea of running away from home was going to West Point. She’d taken the right job. Married the right man-or so they’d all believed. Never once had she been the wild child. Never once had she rebelled.
And now, standing here in this small, spotless kitchen of this small, spotless house, Des suddenly felt herself suffocating. Every nerve ending in her body seemed to be crying out for spontaneity, for life. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” she replied softly.
“Well, Desiree, you’d better figure it out. And soon. Because there is zero room for doubt in our business.” He watched her intently over his coffee cup. “Tell me, what’s his name?”
“Whose name?”
“This man who has thrown you for a loop.”
“No man has thrown me anywhere,” she shot back, bristling. “Why do you immediately assume it’s a man? Why can’t it just be me?”
“Little late for us to be having this conversation, isn’t it?”
“Are you talking about late in the evening or late in life?”
“Like I said,” he responded, “it’s late.”
She rinsed out her cup and sat back down at the table across from him. “So what do I do now?”
“Your job.”
“You just told me that the one man who might be able to help me is off limits.”
“That’s your job,” he affirmed. “To get results, no matter what. If it were a smooth, easy ride, nothing but cherry pie, they wouldn’t be paying you. You’d be paying them. That’s the truth, girl. That’s the real world.” He trailed off a moment, his broad chest rising and falling. “Deal with it. Or find yourself a new world to live in.”
The Havenhursts, Bud and Mandy, lived in a doll-sized version of the big summer cottage where Redfield and Bitsy Peck lived. The shutters and front door of the little house were painted colonial blue. The window boxes were bursting with pansies. Two cars were parked out front in the gravel drive, a Range Rover and an old MG convertible.
One tabloid news crew was parked at the entrance to the bridge. Otherwise, all was quiet.
No Studebaker pickup was parked outside of Mitch Berger’s carriage house. Des pulled up in her slicktop and got out, buttoning her blazer. The stiff morning breeze out on Big Sister was distinctly chilly.
She used his spare key to check up on Baby Spice, a.k.a. Clementine. This time Des found her upstairs in Mitch’s half-open T-shirt drawer, fast asleep. The little vixen barely stirred at the sound of Des cooing at her. Doubtless she had spent the wee hours exploring her new universe. She still had plenty of food and water. Her litter box had been used. Des cleaned it out, yawning hugely. What she really felt like doing was shucking her clothes and jumping into that nice warm bed.
The man’s clothes closet was downstairs. Des opened the closet door, figuring now was as good a time as any to find out. A wool shirt Mitch Berger had been wearing the first day she met him was hanging from a hook. She removed it and buried her face in it, inhaling his aroma. Instantly, she felt a fluttering sensation all the way from her tummy to her toes. Followed by a sense of giddy light-headedness. Briefly, she thought she might faint.
And this was with a stuffed-up nose.
Damn, damn, damn.
She hurriedly returned the shirt to its hook and went back out to her cruiser and popped the trunk, staring down at what she’d brought with her. It lay there atop her first-aid kit, flares, blankets and other emergency gear. She hesitated a moment before she removed it. She could not believe how nervous she was. Her hands were actually shaking. She took it inside and laid it on his desk. She locked up and slid the key back under the boot scraper.
Then she knocked on the Havenhursts’ door.
It was Mandy who answered it. She had on a plum-colored Izod shirt and khaki slacks, her long blond hair pulled back in a tight, tight ponytail. In fact, everything about her seemed pulled taut. Her flesh was drawn across the bones of her face like the skin over a snare drum. The cords in her neck stood out, fists were clenched, knuckles white.
“I didn’t expect to find you here, Mrs. Havenhurst,” Des said, surprised.
“Why wouldn’t I be here?” Mandy responded sharply, her eyes icy blue pinpoints. “This is my home, Lieutenant. I live here.”
“I understood you were in New York.”
Mandy stared at her with utter contempt. “You ‘understood’ I was in New York?”
“Mr. Berger happened to mention it.”
“Is Mitch back?” she asked casually, shooting a not-so-causal look over Des’s shoulder at his house.
“No, we spoke on the phone.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I drove back late last night with Bud. We picked up my car at the station.”
“Your husband was in the city yesterday, too?”
“He was,” Mandy replied, smiling tightly. It came off more like a grimace. Actually, Mandy’s face was starting to remind Des of one of those sun-bleached animal skulls that people find out in the desert and hang as wall ornaments in their homes.
“You and Mr. Havenhurst went in together?” she persisted, wondering if this creamy, twisted blonde was ever going to invite her inside.
“No, we went in separately-our schedules didn’t quite match up.” Mandy raised her chin at Des, her nostrils flaring. “I don’t mean to be pointy, Lieutenant, but I’m not exactly accustomed to having my comings and goings put under a microscope by law enforcement officers.”
“Most impressive,” Des said, smiling at her approvingly. “I mean it-you’ve got what my friend Ms. Bella Tillis calls chutzpah. But you and I both know that you have an extensive police record, so let’s not pull each other’s curls, allright?”
“Whatever Mitch told you about last night isn’t true!” Mandy declared, her voice rising, cheeks mottling. “He got the wrong idea about me. About us. He came after me. And he wouldn’t take a firm no for an answer. And he-”
“Mr. Berger told me next to nothing,” Des said coldly. “I’d suggest you do the same, unless you’re looking to press formal charges.”
“Why, no. I was simply trying to-”
“Good. Because I am not someone who you want to be talking to about this. I am not your sister. I am not your friend. And I am for damned sure not Doctor Laura. Now is your husband in? I’d like to ask him some questions.”
Mandy finally let her inside. It was quaint and snug, with low ceilings and lots of country antique furniture. Arrangements of dried herbs were on display everywhere, just like in Country Living magazine. It reminded Des of that inn in rural Vermont she and Brandon stayed in once. All that was missing was the pervasive smell of potpourri. There was a parlor and a dining room. The airy farmhouse kitchen opened onto the back porch. Bud Havenhurst was slumped at a wicker table out there with a cup of coffee, his back to the panoramic view of Long Island Sound.
It occurred to Des that only someone who had lived on Big Sister a very long time would sit facing the house, not the water.
He wore a starched white shirt, striped tie, dark slacks and even darker circles under his eyes. He seemed very tired and drawn. The smile he gave her was a weak one. “Good morning, Lieutenant,” he said, climbing politely to his feet. “Sorry if I’m not fully awake yet. We got back quite late last night. Please, sit.”
Des did so, facing the view. A couple of fishing boats were already out, and a work boat was chugging its way across the Sound toward Plum Island.
“Do you need me here, sugar?” Mandy asked him from the kitchen doorway. “I want to get some things at the market.”
“You go right ahead, hon.” He made a big fuss out of escorting his young wife out, doting on her, kissing her good-bye. He seemed excessively clingy. Des found herself wondering if this was for her benefit. She heard the little MG start up with a throaty roar and speed off in a splatter of gravel. Then Havenhurst came back and sat down and said, “Now, then, Lieutenant, how may I help you?”
“I tried to see you at your office yesterday. You weren’t in.”
“Some things came up that required my presence in New York.”
“Your wife and Mr. Berger rode into the city themselves yesterday morning.”
“That’s right. She told me she ran into him on the train. I drove in a bit later in the day.”
“Why didn’t you and she go in together?”
“It was something of a last-minute thing on my part,” he answered vaguely. “A financial matter.”
“Can anyone confirm what time you arrived?”
“The fellow at the parking garage I use, I imagine.”
Des nodded, well aware that for twenty dollars your average parking lot attendant would swear under oath that he had seen Elvis pull up in a pink Cadillac-with Marilyn Monroe seated next to him in the front seat.
He rubbed a thumb carefully along his big, thrusting chin, as if to test his morning shave. “It’s on Second Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. And I still have the ticket stub somewhere, I think. But, frankly, I’m having trouble seeing how my visit to New York has anything to do with matters that concern you.”
“It concerns me,” Des explained, “because someone tried to shove Mr. Berger in front of a subway train yesterday morning in Times Square. He claims it happened shortly after he said good-bye to your wife.”
Now Bud Havenhurst went silent on her, his face a stone cold blank. The man conveyed nothing. It was just like sitting across the table from a lawn statue. Lawyers. They were worse than born liars, she reflected bitterly. These bastards were trained at it by high priests.
She elected to move on. “Let’s talk about your ex-wife’s missing money.”
“Mitch spoke to you about that?” Bud asked her uneasily.
“He did.”
“And you understand why I did what I did?”
“I understand bupkes,” she said sharply. “Maybe you believed you were acting in your ex-wife’s best interest. But I’m not prepared to say whether what you did was legal or ethical or proper. Or whether a Connecticut State Bar Association grievance panel will find probable cause for misconduct. Or whether a judge will suspend your license to practice law.” She paused a moment, the better to dangle her bait. “Of course, if you’re prepared to give some news I can use, then that’s another matter entirely…”
Bud Havenhurst suddenly became very interested in the view. He even got up and went over to the porch railing so he could get a better look at it. “Such as?”
“Such as it occurs to me that you are in and out of Mrs. Seymour’s house…”
He turned back to face her. “It used to be my house,” he said quietly.
“Did you write that Dear John letter?”
He shook his head emphatically. “If I had done that, then I’d be Niles Seymour’s murderer. And I’m not.”
“You weren’t home in bed the night that Tuck Weems was murdered. Where were you?”
Havenhurst didn’t respond. Just went into statue mode again.
“Were you with your ex-wife? Were you sleeping with her?”
He heaved a pained sigh. “No, Dolly wouldn’t have me again in a million years,” he replied, his face expressing a curious mix of longing, frustration and hopelessness. He was an older man besotted with a volatile and promiscuous younger woman. Yet he clearly remained attached to his first wife. Maybe he just didn’t know what, or who, he wanted. Maybe he was just a fool-he was a fully grown adult male, after all. “I just looked in on her,” he explained. “To make sure she wasn’t wandering. She does, as I believe I’ve mentioned to you.”
“You didn’t mention that you were soaking wet when you got home. How did you get so wet, Mr. Havenhurst?”
“I walked on the beach.”
“In the middle of a violent rainstorm?”
“I like to walk in the rain. I find it therapeutic.”
“Are you in need of therapy?”
“Everyone is in need of therapy.”
And these were supposed to be the happy people. Had their own damned island. If they weren’t happy, who was? “Did anyone see you?” she asked.
“No, of course not.”
Just as no one could recall seeing his son, Evan, and Jamie Devers docked out on Little Sister Island having themselves a bonfire. She had checked with the Coast Guard. She had checked with the boatyards. Nothing. Everywhere she turned it came up nothing.
Havenhurst abruptly glanced at his watch. “I really have to be getting to my law office, Lieutenant. A number of my later appointments got pushed up to this morning because of Niles Seymour’s funeral this afternoon. Are we done?”
“Not a problem,” Des said agreeably. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from your appointments. The big wheel of justice must keep on turning.” She climbed to her feet and treated him to her maximum-wattage smile. “But, counselor, I would not be saying we’re done.”