Mistaken Identities
They say however bad things are, one adult who understands you can make all the difference. My mother was that one adult for Lonnie Fraker. For me, she was everything. For him, she was everything else. She gave him a lot of good advice—bullshit other people if you have to, but never bullshit yourself. Never ask permission, people love to say no. You can never go wrong by keeping your mouth shut. Fat is good for you. Keep your vinyl. Dress in layers. Unfortunately, she also gave him one piece of catastrophically bad advice. She told him to come out to Mark Toland.
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
The three days before the incident at Nantucket High School were frantic and overworked. By lunch on Tuesday I had dropped Chris Contrell firmly into my out-basket—another mundane scrap of business concluded and filed, like a paid Harbor Fuel bill or the RSVP for Lena Perry’s wedding. I had more important things to think about.
It started with a phone call from Franny Tate. For a second or two I didn’t recognize her voice. “Mark is dead, Henry. He’s dead.”
“Wait a second. Hello? Who is this?”
She had called on my private cell, and her number was blocked.
“Elkins shot him. It must have been Elkins.”
“Elkins? Roy Elkins? He’s in jail. Franny?”
“He escaped.”
“Wait, what? How could he possibly—?”
Impatience tightened her voice, like a tug on a clove hitch. But that knot comes loose easily. “Don’t you watch the news?”
“No, not in the last few days. So wait a second…you’re saying Roy Elkins—”
“He’s out. And he’s killing the people we love.”
“He’s—we? What people? I don’t exactly—”
“Hank, listen to me. Do you remember at the sentencing? He said he was going to kill the people we loved. And he’s doing it. He shot Jill Obremski and Carol Stambaugh and Lucy Miner.”
“Jill Obremski? How could that possibly—Chuck would have called me.”
“Chuck hasn’t called anyone. And his phone goes to voicemail. So don’t bother trying to reach him.”
I took a moment to breathe, and Franny let me put it together. “There’s no other connection between the victims, and that means I’m next,” I said.
“Crazy as it sounds.”
“Yeah.”
“At least you got a warning. That’s more than the rest of us got.”
“Thanks, Franny.”
“Keep your people safe.”
I sat still at my desk for a minute or two after we hung up, then opened my computer and googled Elkins. As I scrolled through the various news sites, it became clear that no one but Franny had figured out the connection between Roy’s prison break and the various murders. Or if they had, they weren’t sharing the information with the news media. I’d assign protection details for Miranda and the kids, though the kids would hate it, and Miranda would assume I was being paranoid. More like overcautious—Elkins seemed to have up-to-date intel on his targets. He had killed Jane’s boyfriend, not her ex-husband, and left Chuck Obremski’s children alone. Still, it would be foolish to assume a maniac would behave consistently. Elkins could have a special grudge against me, or he could be decompensating, spiraling down into some unknowable level of madness. So they would have round-the-clock guards until the crisis was over—I could easily spare the manpower.
But Jane presented a more difficult problem. She was Elkins’s apparent prime target, but without a marriage license to officially certify our connection, I would have to protect her myself. I would have to field my own team of bodyguards.
I thought of David Trezize’s old friend Mitchell Stone, who had indeed been the new crew member cleaning up Sylvester Graham’s house. I had spoken to him briefly the day before, expecting a crazy vet with anger management issues. Instead, he was calm and charming—and sincerely rueful about the Faregrounds fracas. He alluded to a complex history with various intelligence organizations, none of which he could talk about, and none of which mattered to him anymore.
“I’m retired,” he told me.
“Okay. Just try to stay out of trouble, old man.”
He laughed. “It’s weird, Chief. Trouble seems to follow me. I’m like a crazy magnet.”
“So, you get into a lot of fights?”
He shrugged. “Mostly, I break them up.”
“Well, feel free to do that.”
It occurred to me now that Stone might be a handy bodyguard, but it seemed a lot to ask of a virtual stranger, and I had a better idea, anyway.
A few months before, I had found myself confronted by a pair of Bulgarian thugs—brothers named Boiko and Dimo Tabachev. Instead of fighting them and getting pulverized or arresting them, I hired them to work for the NPD as part-time undercover operatives, gofers, delivery men, and liaisons to the Eastern European immigrant community. Basically, they did a little of everything and pretty much anything I asked. I paid them in cash and wound up enjoying their company. They were energetic, jovial, basically good-hearted thugs, and they had proved quite useful in tracking down the culprit when the artistic director of the Nantucket Theater Lab had been killed at the start of the summer season.
Dimo was the older brother, and Boiko let him do most of the talking. He was no genius, but he had a street-hustler’s shrewd cunning, and he took care of his brother in various ways. He collected my cash payments and gave Boiko an allowance. “Otherwise, he lose it all with Keno and boiler making drinks.”
“Hello, boss!” Dimo bellowed into the phone when I called him.
“I need you and Boiko to do some bodyguard work for me.”
“I am expert with that! Whose body are we guard?”
“My fiancée—Jane Stiles.”
“Oh. Serious.”
“I’m afraid so.”
He knew our address on Darling Street, and I gave him the information on Jane’s little office in the White Heron actor’s residence on North Water Street. I texted him links to Elkins’s Wikipedia page and the Google Images catalogue of photographs going back fifteen years.
“Be careful, Dimo. Elkins is dangerous.”
A contemptuous grunt. “So is Dimo and Boiko. Ask the GDBOP!”
In fact, I already had. Bulgaria’s General Directorate Combating Organized Crime had been chasing the brothers for a decade but had never been able to gather enough evidence for an indictment. I had spoken briefly with Miroslav Pabian, the GDBOP colonel in charge of investigating a large-antiques trafficking ring. He had been convinced Dimo was running the operation and had broken into the Tabachevs’ Sofia residence—a town house in Boyana, with a view of Yuzhen Park—fully expecting to find various Roman artifacts, including a stolen gravestone. But the house was empty. The brothers were gone—and the snitch recanted.
Dimo was blithe when I mentioned the raid to him. “Foolish to steal gravestone! Much better with coins and crosses—what we are call engolpion—religious items, small, easy to carry. Quick to sell for collectors. Not that I would do! These are terrible crimes, Mr. Police! Nothing sacred in Bulgaria now. Is very bad thing.”
I hung up with a smile—no need for Skype; I could actually hear the jaunty little wink in Dimo’s voice—and turned back to official police business. Rob Roman was coming in later to discuss his investigation of Cindy Henderson. Meanwhile, I had to check the Selectmen’s meeting minutes, review some violations uncovered by the environmental police—people were dumping thinner and old paint in the moors again. And I finally got started on Haden Krakauer’s evaluations of the summer community service officers—the “summer specials”—all of whom were wildly ambitious and eager for a spot on the regular police roster and many of whom chafed at their lack of authority.
Reading between the lines—Haden was always impeccably tolerant with the wannabees—I could see that a few of them were a little too ambitious. How many times could one kid on bike patrol claim that some hapless person of color or immigrant had “backed into” his ten-speed without the cycle showing a single scratch? At least he wasn’t tasing them, but that was only because I had forbidden the use of tasers. Weeding out the bullies was a big part of my job, and I had more than enough of them on the force as it was.
Shortly after that, finally out of the office and back cruising the street, I picked up the backup call from Hamilton Tyler on my scanner.
My excuse for breathing a little fresh air was taking Haden Krakauer to pick up his civilian ride from Billy Built Automotive near the airport. The “officer requests help” request came from Ham and Jill Swenson, his training partner. I put them together hoping she might teach him some of the fine points of social interaction. She was a kind, thoughtful young woman, fresh out of the Seton Hall Police Graduate Studies program, and though her only authority over Ham was a disapproving look, that could often be enough.
Their six was the vest-pocket park near the airport—a cheerless swath of lawn dotted with bronze sculptures of playing children. They were the liveliest aspect of the place. I had never seen an actual person in that little patch of grass, only brown metal boys and girls playing with brown metal balls and climbing brown metal trees. A real tree or two might have been nice—and might even have attracted some real children. But the statues were donated, and real trees were expensive. Anyway, after it had spent years as a ghost commons, now some sort of incident requiring police backup had happened there.
Which brought up another complaint. We had too many officers, and we deployed them too freely. I had a standing order against sending more than one extra unit to any disturbance, but I couldn’t monitor every call-out, and sheer force of numbers made some officers feel more secure. I understood that. But five squad cars, with sirens howling and flashers flaring, clustered around some Jamaican’s pickup truck with a broken turn signal served no purpose and made Nantucket look like a racist police state. Three cruisers had arrived at the airport park already—to corral one scrawny-looking Hispanic kid.
Time for another staff meeting.
Byron Lovell and our first African American patrol officer, Patty Stokes, were leaning against their car, sipping take-out coffee from the Trading Post along with Sam Dixon and Randy Ray. Those two presented as a Laurel-and-Hardy pair of townies, though without the charming accents, physical grace, or comic timing. Familiar types—their families went back five generations on the island, and they would always view me as a glorified tourist. I lifted a hand to them as I climbed out of my cruiser. They nodded back.
Hamilton Tyler and Jill Swenson were dealing with the kid.
As we crossed the lawn toward them, passing a bronze fisherman with a bronze toddler on his shoulders, David Trezize pulled up in his new Honda Fit. We had new police band transmitters that used a closed wavelength, but David had managed to hack them somehow. I let it go. Our local alternative newspaper editor was incorrigible, but I liked him for it—and he often proved helpful with my investigations. He loved research, and he never forgot a name or a court case.
Today was a good example.
He trotted up to us, pudgy and disheveled in khakis, an untucked blue shirt, and a flapping cardigan. “Hey, Chief!” He slowed down to a walk beside us. “That’s Armando Morales—new kid on the block. Trying to make his bones with the Tres Vatos gang. He’s hermanos de frontera with Ramon Cruz—second cousin or something. But he’s fallen in with Miguel Alfaro, the young Turk who’s trying to take over. Nasty little punk. He dropped by the paper to tell me not to write anything about them.”
“Did you agree?”
“Fuck, no.”
“I haven’t seen anything in the paper so far.”
David’s face clenched for a second. “I’m waiting until I have the whole story. There’s two groups here that I know about—the Tres Vatos and the Malditos Azteca. The Malditos are new. Supposedly they’re trying to corner the opioid market, and they’re nasty—just like the young Vatos kids. So far, Ramon Cruz has kept the peace, but he’s on the way out, and they’re sick of his old-school rules—not selling to kids, no unnecessary violence, treaties with the other gangs, that kind of stuff. Old man stuff. They’d all love to get rid of him. My guess is they were trying to scare Ramon off today. Send a new kid to rough him up. Some kind of initiation, maybe? I can’t think of any other reason to use a punk like Armando Morales for a job like this.”
I knew most of what David was telling us, but I let him talk. He always knew a few extra details—like the facts about this Morales kid—and I didn’t want to miss anything.
Haden said, “How did you know Ramon was here?”
David shrugged. “The 911 call described a tussle with a middle-aged Hispanic dude. He knocked the kid down, walked over to the gas station, and drove off in a Nissan Murano. Sounds like Ramon to me. That’s his ride.”
I could see Haden starting a slow burn. “How do you know about our 911 calls?”
“Contacts in the department, Assistant Chief Krakauer. Friends of the free press.”
“I want those names.”
“I never reveal my sources.”
He grabbed at David, who danced away with surprising agility.
“Haden.”
He heard the warning in my voice and dropped his arms to his sides with a tight exhale and bitter head shake. I knew he disapproved of my professional relationship with David and his scrappy little newspaper, The Nantucket Shoals, but I didn’t care. It was true I gave the chubby little reporter special privileges, but he’d earned them, and he never abused my trust.
We reached the threesome in the middle of the lawn.
I nodded at the junior partner. “Jill.” Then I turned to Ham. “Break it down for me, Officer Tyler. What happened here?”
“We took the call—”
Jill stepped forward. “Actually, Patty and Byron were closer. They grabbed it, but Ham—”
“We were ranking patrol, and I wanted to check it out for myself. Maybe teach Jill something about dealing with the illegal population. The others showed up anyway. Plenty of backup now that you’re here, Chief.”
As he spoke, a big black Ford F150 jumped the curb and rolled across the grass toward us, digging up the turf when it stopped. State Police Captain Lonnie Fraker, my longtime frenemy, colleague, rival, and now landlord, bounded out onto the field. A big man with a small head and a high-pitched voice, he moved with an athlete’s easy grace. He’d been a star tight end on the Whalers football team back in the day, or so he liked to boast—seventeen catches and two hundred sixty-five yards in his best season. He had the stats and would gladly show you the pictures.
“Everything under control here, Chief?” he squeaked.
“We’re good, Lonnie.”
Haden was looking past him, pulling his phone from his pocket, scrolling to the camera app. I followed his gaze. A long green snake was slithering down from the tailgate of Lonnie’s truck, along the tire and into the grass. Haden got a few good pictures before it undulated away. He shook his head, slipping the phone back in his pocket. “A smooth green snake! Amazing. Guess we know where you’ve been today, Lonnie.”
“I was fishing at Sesachacha Pond.”
“Right.”
“I was! Caught some gorgeous perch. Looked like record-breakers.”
“Can I see?”
“Catch and release, buddy. That’s my philosophy.”
They stared at each other. This afternoon was going off the rails. I turned back to Ham Tyler. “Lay this situation out for us.”
“Well, so, when we got here the scuffle was over. The second individual was running toward the gas station. Jill stayed to question this kid.” He tilted his head at Morales. “I pursued the perp on foot. He drove off before I got out of the park. Gray Nissan Murano, license plate NJL249, registered to Ramon Cruz.”
“Uh, I think it was a white Murano,” Jill put in tentatively.
“It was dusty.”
“I don’t know…”
“You have to learn to look at what you’re seeing, Officer Swenson! A gray car is a gray car. A white car that’s dirty is a dirty white car.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Somehow it irked me to have her calling Hamilton Tyler “sir.” In fact, her mistake had confirmed my own theory of what had actually occurred in the airport park. But that was none of anyone else’s business. Right now, I needed to break the tension and get things moving again.
I turned back to Ham. “Good catch on the plate number.”
“Thanks, Chief.” The praise emboldened him a little. He stood up straighter. “The way I see it, the kid was threatening Ramon over some internecine gang dispute. This is a good place to meet—kind of in plain sight but still invisible? Word on the street is, the newer members of the Tres Vatos gang are trying to push Ramon out. But whatever the argument was about, it ended with Ramon knocking the kid on his ass and taking off. It could have been worse.”
David Trezize cleared his throat skeptically. It had something to do with the cocked angle of his head, but he looked like a baffled dog. “I don’t see what Ramon was doing here in the first place.”
“This is police business, Trezize,” Ham snapped. Then to me: “What is this hack even doing here?”
“Well, for one thing—asking smart questions. Go on, David.”
“I just meant…Ramon is super careful, always was, but especially now, with everyone gunning for him—not just his own upstart members but also the Maltidos Azteca—mostly, he stays home. He makes his living buying and selling Mexican collectibles on eBay—”
Ham snorted. “Launders his drug money, you mean.”
“Whatever. Anyway, he’s supposedly on the computer all the time bidding for Saltillo blankets or Talavera pottery. Which suits him because the outside world has gotten kind of scary for aging gangbangers. So why come to the airport park today and put himself in the crosshairs? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe we should ask him,” Ham said.
I nodded. “I’ll follow up with Ramon. You talk to the gas station people. Maybe they saw something helpful.” I took a step toward young Armando Morales. “Anything to add?” I asked him.
“Who, me?”
“You were here. You have the bashed-in face to prove it.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You didn’t commit a crime, Armando. It is Armando?” He nodded. “You’re the victim here, as far as I can see.”
“I still want a lawyer. Quiero un abogado.”
“So you did commit a crime?”
“I dint do nothing. But when the cops put you in the shit you gotta have the big boots, comprende?”
I nodded. “Lo entiende. Quién te golpeó?” Who hit you?
“Cómo dijo—Ramon Cruz. Ese es un viejo hombre malo, si?”
I laughed. “Si.” Ramon was a mean old man. So was his brother. “What was the fight about?”
“You tell me. He was pissed, though. Tell you that much.”
I took Armando’s cell number and let him go. We could reach him easily that way if we needed to. Ham and Jill were still hovering. “You two go back to the station and write this up. Everyone else needs to be out on patrol. Let the others know. Coffee break’s over.”
Back in my cruiser, Haden said, “What?”
“What do you mean ‘what’?”
“Come on, Chief. I know you.”
I had to smile. Haden’s intuitions were on target, as usual. I wished his small-arms results were half as good. He had failed to requalify on the range this year—his hands were shaking too hard for an accurate shot. Whether it was a bad hangover or the aftereffect of a cold-turkey dry-out, I couldn’t guess—and didn’t want to. Haden’s demons were his own problem, and as long as he didn’t bring them to work, I let him alone. He was a good cop. He had joined AA—he had told me so, and a friend confirmed it. That wasn’t supposed to happen, of course, but it always did. Some wag had called Alcoholics Anonymous on Nantucket “Alcoholics Notorious.” Sad, but true.
Haden continued to study me as I drove. “You didn’t buy a word of that bullshit back there, did you?”
“What makes you say it was bullshit?”
“Your face, Chief. Not a great poker face. Go Fish, maybe.”
“Naaa. I was the worst at Go Fish. Everybody always knew exactly what cards I was holding.”
“So give.”
“Okay. Armando’s injuries were all on the right side of his face. That implies a left-handed hitter. Sebastian is left-handed.”
“Sorry, but how would you know that?”
“He wrote a play a couple of years ago—Sinistromanual. Ever see it?”
“I’m not sure what—”
“The word means left-handed. It was a satire about all the left-handed people being rounded up and put into camps. ‘I love your jodido language,’ he told me.”
“Jodido?”
“It means—fucked up. He said, ‘English! You manage to get sinister in there somehow, in case we lefties wondered what you really thought about us.’ And it’s not just the left-handed thing. The brothers look alike. And Sebastian drives a gray Murano.”
“Not a dirty white Murano?”
“Those boys keep their cars immaculate.”
“So maybe it was a mistaken identity thing. The kid thought he was confronting Ramon.”
“Yeah.”
We drove along quietly. I turned off onto Tomahawk Road and wound my way through Nantucket’s newest and ugliest industrial park to the Billy Built garage. We sat in the car and let it idle. “Still,” Haden said, “Ham saw the license plate number.”
“From that distance? You’re the bird-watcher.”
“You’re saying he knew the number off the top of his head?”
“I’m saying he knew it.”
“So…”
“So Ham knew it was Sebastian and covered for him. I can’t help wondering if all this has anything to do with the break-in at Sebastian’s house last week.”
“Why would it?”
“I don’t know. But things work that way. Incidents close together tend to get tangled up—like power cords in a closet. It reminds me of something that happened in LA about a year before I left. My boss, Chuck Obremski, was using this lowlife movie producer, Dale Phillips, to gather evidence on the Russian mobsters who were financing his movies, using them to launder their drug profits. Phillips managed to get himself arrested for cocaine possession the day before a crucial meeting to which he had agreed to wear a wire. So Chuck took him out of jail, tore up the arrest report, and had the GND detectives who made the arrest transferred out of the Guns and Narcotics Division and attached to Customs Enforcement in San Pedro, a lousy job and a punitive commute. He told them maybe they’d think twice next time before they crapped all over someone else’s sting.”
Haden frowned. “I’m not really following this.”
“Chuck wanted Dale Phillips on the street, free and clear. It’s the same thing today. Ham Tyler wants Sebastian Cruz on the street. But why? What does he want Sebastian for? That’s what I don’t get.”
I went to see Sebastian later that day, but he had no answers for me. He had gone to the airport park to pace it out for a bid. He was hoping to secure the town landscaping contract for various public spaces, and he liked to walk the land before he agreed to work on it. Of course, he had never set foot in the park before.
“Armando must have followed me,” he said. It had to be a case of mistaken identity—both car and person. “We do look alike. And those Muranos…”
Why had Ham Tyler let him go and then covered for him? No idea. As for Ham, I already knew his views on the interchangeability of Hispanic faces.
As for Ramon, he had time-stamped eBay bids plus conversations with the carpentry crew that was patching his deck to verify his whereabouts. He was dismissive about Armando. “Lucky for him he braced my brother.”
“Lucky for you, too. You could have wound up in jail for felony assault. I might not be able to keep ICE off you again. I might not even try.”
I ended the day with suspicions and misgivings, and not much else. I put off Rob Roman and his investigation until Wednesday and went home.
My mom was sitting at the kitchen table, having a cup of her chamomile tea with Jane.
“It’s always been the same in this country,” she was saying. “Socialism for the rich—free market capitalism for the poor.”
I stepped over, kissed the top of her head. “Are you trying to radicalize my fiancée?”
Jane smiled up at me. “Too late.”
“I’m just so angry about everything that’s happening now,” Mom said. “And people are losing their outrage. That’s the worst part. You have to keep your sense of outrage.”
I nodded, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “But it’s so exhausting.”
Jane said, “The plumber came today, but the sink is still dripping. It’s like Billy Delavane always says, ‘There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it twice..’”
I moved to the sink and twiddled the faucet. One drip bulged out and then another. I shrugged. “Good enough for Nantucket.”
Jane laughed. “You’re finally starting to sound like a local.”
Mom said, “There was beautiful catfish at 167 today. Bill saved me a piece. I thought I’d make it for dinner.”
This was odd and yet typical. My mom had been on-island for less than a week, but she’d already discovered Nantucket’s best fish store—Bill Sandole’s, at 167 Hummock Pond Road—and somehow become good enough friends with the proprietor to get special treatment. Apparently, one of the women who worked there was having trouble with her brother-in-law—there were constant arguments in the small house they shared over everything from politics to house-cleaning.
“I told her, don’t say ‘You’re wrong, you’re bad.’ Tell him how you feel, instead. He can say, ‘I’m not bad, I’m not wrong.’ But if you say ‘What you did hurt my feelings,’ he can’t really say no, it didn’t. It opens up the conversation. It’s non-threatening. So many things people say make the other person stop listening. They don’t hear a thing after you say some terrible thing that makes you feel better.”
“So what happened?”
“I guess they sorted things out.”
“And you get the special catfish.”
“Well, we all do. And Bill’s going to show me the best places to get mussels. Remember that wonderful mussel chowder we made at Sands Point that summer?”
I nodded. “That was great.”
“Well, Bill says the best mussels are under the rocks at the jetties. He said he’d take me.”
“Mom. You have Parkinson’s! You’re not going to go scrambling around the jetties with Bill Sandole!”
“Maybe when I feel better.”
“Maybe.”
She had recently launched into an exercise program that put my own sporadic calisthenics to shame. If a person could beat back an incurable illness with optimism and sheer force of will, she would be the one to do it. She liked to say “The crazy thing is, I’m in perfect health except for this stupid disease.”
Coming from her, it almost made sense.
We were in the middle of making dinner, and Jane was pitching a crazy new story idea, when I got the call from Dr. Conrad Parrish, Cindy’s father.
“My publisher is giving me a stand-alone book,” Jane was saying. “Kind of a break from Maddie Clark—and I woke up this morning with the wildest high-concept premise ever.”
I looked up from chopping onions. “Tell us.”
“Okay. Here it is. What if…” She seemed to think better of it.
“Go on,” Mom urged her.
“Maybe it’s too crazy.”
“We’ll be the judge of that,” I said with a stern finger wag.
“Okay, okay. So—what if every rock-and-roll death since the late fifties was the work of one serial killer?”
“Too crazy,” I agreed.
Mom laughed out loud. “I love it!”
“How would that even work?” I asked.
“I don’t know…maybe some retired detective sees the same weird face in too many photographs. Or it’s a writer, and he’s doing, like, a history-of-rock coffee-table book. This weird guy was on the ground crew next to Buddy Holly’s plane—and delivering room service to Elvis’s hotel room.”
Before I could answer, my phone rang. I picked up, opened the line, and heard an angry bellow. “My son is dead! What are you going to do about it?”
“Excuse me?”
“You put him in jail. You painted the target on his back! Now the shot has found its mark, and his blood is on your hands.”
“Who am I speaking with?”
“Conrad Parrish. Dr. Conrad Parrish. Nathan Parrish’s father.”
“How did you get this number?”
“I’m the chief of thoracic surgery at Lenox Hill. I’ve donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Nantucket Cottage Hospital renovation and operated on most of the other donors. I get what I want.”
That jogged my memory. Mike Henderson had been complaining about his father-in-law’s raving God complex and his tyrannical behavior for years. Still, I’d never met the man myself.
“Wait a second,” I told him. “Nathan Parrish is dead?”
I had arrested Nathan in connection with my first Nantucket murder case. He had paid some local thugs—including Billy Delavane’s brother, Ed—to kill swindler and faux billionaire Preston Lomax before he could run out on a massive real estate deal that would have transformed a hundred acres of pristine island brambles and ponds into The Moorlands Mall. With Lomax dead, the deal reverted to his company’s control, and Parrish had an ironclad arrangement with the LoGran Corporation. Or so he thought. A murder conviction tends to be a deal breaker, even in today’s America.
“These people have long memories, Kennis.”
“Which people?”
“You tell me.”
“Listen, I’m sorry, Dr. Parrish, but I’ve had a long day and—”
“So you’ve decided it was just some random hit-and-run incident?”
“I haven’t really—I wasn’t even—”
“Some total stranger texting with his girlfriend happens to plow into a group of low-security work-release prisoners cleaning up the roadside. No one else is even injured, but one prisoner is killed. Pure happenstance! According to you.”
“I’m not saying that, but—”
“And on the very same day, his accomplice in crime miraculously escapes from prison. Coincidence?”
“Well…”
“I thought policemen didn’t believe in coincidence.”
“Wait a second. You’re saying Ed Delavane—”
“He’s gone! He was being taken into Boston for some kind of hearing. He overpowered the guards and took off. Both of the guards are in custody, which makes sense. I don’t see how he could have done it without their help!”
“I haven’t heard anything about this, Dr. Parrish.”
“Then you should start paying attention! I would say that was your job description. I would say that’s the minimum requirement.”
“I can talk to the people at Cedar Junction in the morning, Dr. Parrish. They may have some idea of what’s going on if the incidents are connected. But it’s not my jurisdiction, and—”
“Of course it’s not your ‘jurisdiction’! Don’t hide behind that bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. You have a moral responsibility here, Kennis. Nathan’s killing reeks of malice! It reeks of bitterness and rage and retribution—and all of that ripened and festered on your little island. Nantucket! The place makes me sick. So putrid and petty and ingrown. I’ve told Cindy this for years. All the little feuds and grudges. It’s like a fire without a screen, Kennis. Everything’s fine until a spark jumps the hearth and sets the rug ablaze. Then your cozy little hideout turns into a living hell.”
“I’ll look into it, Dr. Parrish.”
“You better! Or everything that happens will be on your head.”
“Wait a second. What are you trying to—?”
But he had already hung up.
“What’s going on?” Jane asked.
“Nathan Parrish was killed by a hit-and-run driver yesterday. He was on work release, picking up trash. And Ed Delavane broke out of prison.”
Mom looked up. “The doctor thinks the two incidents are related?”
“Yeah, but I don’t see how. They’re in different jails for the same crime, and if someone wanted to kill them both, busting Ed out of jail doesn’t seem like an ideal strategy.”
“Death by police?”
“I guess that’s possible. But a toothbrush shiv in the shower seems a lot less complicated.”
“And someone else from your past is stalking Jane now.”
“Yeah.”
“But not Ed Delavane,” Jane put in. “I never had that kind of problem with Ed. I mean, he was a bully and a psycho, but I was dating his brother, and he never seemed interested. He had no grudge against me, and I don’t see him carrying a grudge for twenty years, brooding, anyway. That’s not his style. I really like Dimo and Boiko, by the way. I thought I’d hate having them around, but Boiko is very polite and quiet, and Dimo…he found out I’m a writer, and now he wants me to put him in a book. ‘I am immigrant success story! With big funny adventures. We make big bestseller and share monies!’” She mimicked him perfectly.
“He might be onto something there,” I said.
“I just don’t see why I need them around.”
“You don’t know Roy Elkins. He’s a stone killer with scores to settle and nothing to lose. If Franny Tate is scared, you should be, too. Seriously. I posted a BOLO on Elkins, the FBI put out an APB on him from Maine to New Jersey, and every one of my people has his picture. He can’t board a plane or rent a car. He can’t use his credit cards. Which is all great, but it might not be enough. Hence, Dimo and Boiko. They’re your insurance policy.”
Jane studied the tabletop. “Okay, now I’m scared.”
Mom was frowning. “What about that crazy fan with Jane’s book—the one who killed that girl in Australia? That wasn’t Roy Elkins, Hanky.”
“I love it that she calls you Hanky,” Jane said.
“I’m not really worried about some Australian whack job,” I said. Clearly, Jane wasn’t either. “There’s crazy people all over the world, and you can’t get much farther from Nantucket than Sydney, Australia.” I was starting to regret telling Mom the Australian story.
She shook her head. “It is a long plane flight. But not that long. It’s actually a little bit shocking how quickly you can get places now. Remember that wonderful old movie Around the World in 80 Days?”
Jane smiled. “David Niven and Shirley MacLaine.”
“And Cantinflas! No one remembers Cantinflas anymore.”
“Such is fame,” I said. It was one of my mother’s pet phrases.
She shot me an irritated squint. “That was my world. Around the world in eighty days. Not in one day! That’s what it takes now—less than twenty-four hours.”
“Plus the jet lag,” Jane added. “That adds a day or two. Or ten, on the way back.”
“So the killer will be jet-lagged,” Mom said. “That’s a plus.”
“Mom! This is crazy.”
“I guess so, Hanky, but I keep thinking about the book they found in Australia, next to that poor girl’s body.”
“What about it?”
“Well, have you read Beyond Brant Point Light? It’s all about a local girl who was so horribly mistreated in high school that she comes back to ruin the mean girl’s wedding and winds up getting killed for her trouble.”
“Don’t mess with the mean girls,” Jane said. “Unless you’re Maddie Clark.”
“I read the book, Mom.”
“Well, there you go—it’s the same thing—the past coming back to get you. Like Faulkner said, ‘The past is never dead—’”
“‘—it’s never even past,’” I finished for her. She was one of the few people I’d ever met who had actually read Requiem for a Nun. But then again, she thought Ulysses was a “page turner.” She could swallow one of Jane’s books whole in an afternoon like a shark gulping a guppy.
“So, this loony in Sydney is someone from Jane’s past?”
“Could be.”
“And what does that have to do with Roy Elkins?”
“I don’t know—maybe nothing. Sometimes events just kind of…harmonize, you know? Like that wonderful girl in the program, Lakeisha Taylor, who sang “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” so beautifully and then had a stroke, just like Roberta Flack. Or the way I suddenly saw pregnant women everywhere when I was carrying your brother.”
My mom had run the Upward Bound program at Connecticut College for many years, with a short, wide, spiky, hilarious African American woman named Josephine White. They got hundreds of inner-city kids from New London into college, and my mom still corresponded with many of them. It didn’t surprise me that she remembered Lakeisha’s name. She remembered all their names. They all adored her, but they didn’t have to put up with her irritating habit of scraping and scraping across the grain of their thinking with her stubborn, half-baked theories and harebrained ideas.
The problem was, in my experience, the more she annoyed me, the more likely she was to be right.
That had been true since seventh grade. I still remember complaining about some annoying girl in my class and Mom saying, “I don’t think you dislike Abby. It’s just the opposite, sweetie. I think you like her too much.” God, that was infuriating! And she didn’t even say I-told-you-so when I came home dizzy from the group excursion at Wollman Rink in Central Park, where I kissed Abby, my first kiss ever, and knocked us both down, and she leaned over while we sat on the ice and kissed me back.
But this was different. This was serious. Speculating about mysteriously connected killers on different continents and conjuring twenty-year-old grudges out of obscure cozy mystery novels (sorry, Jane) was pointless and scary and rude.
It was annoying!
I should have paid more attention to that.