Killer Waves (5 page)

Yet I had come back. I always came back.

Diane entered the room sipping a Coke, saying, "I could have saved time by calling the dispatcher, but I needed a drink. Sorry, Lewis."

"Sorry? Don't worry, I'm not thirsty."

She shook her head, sipped gingerly at her straw. "Nope.

Sorry about the license plate numbers. Fred ran them and they all came back negative."

"Negative? In what way?"

A noisy slurp of soda. "Negative in that the plates don't exist, that's why. The State Police and a few federal agencies have an arrangement with the Division of Motor Vehicles in Concord. They can get plates that don't show up on the DMV records, so that nosy police detectives or magazine writers can't trace who they've been assigned to. And to answer your next question-no, I'm not going to pursue it, unless you can show me that they committed a crime in Tyler. Okay?"

"Sounds fair. What's your guess?"

She smiled at me. "Best guess is that I have to leave in two minutes, and that you're going to have to satisfy your curiosity somewhere else."

I nodded. "I guess I will."

Diane turned and put her Coke down on her desk, shoving aside a few envelopes to make room. "Then be careful, my friend. These people seem to be working in some deep and dark places. I'd hate for them to start paying attention to you."

I stood up, suddenly feeling antsy, as if I had to be on the move. "Thanks. And I'll be careful."

"I have no doubt you will. I just worry about the other guys."

I said, "I always worry about the other guys." "Good," Diane said.

Chapter Three

I drove north on Atlantic Avenue, passing the section of Tyler Beach that's known as the Strip. The shops and restaurants and motels were crowded in together, and while the developers years ago didn't quite build on every open bit of space, they sure did give it a try. The traffic was moderate and a lot of the shops and arcades were open, nervous business owners trying to get a jump on the official start of the summer season.

N ear my home I passed the Lafayette House on the left, a large white Victorian-style hotel, and in a matter of minutes I had crossed over into North Tyler and turned right at the entrance to the Samson Point State Wildlife Preserve. From here, the ocean was some distance away, past the open lawns and park buildings.  The ticket kiosk was still closed --- the state of New Hampshire not having officially opened the place --- and I found a parking spot easily enough.

1 got out and walked around the pavement. A couple of dozen cars were scattered across the lot, and people were walking and flying kites or playing with dogs, and a couple of hardy souls were actually sunbathing.  I wandered over to where I thought everything had happened the previous night and sat down on a wooden guardrail, looking out across the parking lot. Several hours earlier, a man in a rental car had come right here and had been murdered. Not more than a ten-minute walk from my house.

I folded my arms, let the sun warm my back. I am not a vigilante nor a guy who goes seeking trouble. Many years ago, trouble had found me and had injured me and had killed a number of friends, and this trouble had eventually sent me here, to my new home on Tyler Beach. For the most part, my new life had been a good one. I should just let this whole thing drop and get on with things, whatever things were out there.

Still ... I had the image of that dead man, in a car, so close to my home. Almost insulting, really. And then there was the matter of the intense men and the very intense woman who had come upon the crime scene and had taken control of everything. I didn't like the way they had acted, and I especially didn't like the way that woman had ordered me out of there. Even if she did have a pretty smile.

A young girl raced by on pudgy legs, a balloon trailing from a string wrapped around her wrist. Her parents chased after her, laughing, not trying too hard to catch up to her, and they ran right across the empty space where the dead man had been, and I shivered. Something bad had happened here, and for whatever reason, from the murder so close to my home to those officious people, things were out of balance. And I felt an urge to set them straight.

So I got up and got back into my Ford, and drove out.

The North Tyler police station is in a small wooden building near the town hall. While smaller than the Tyler police station, it was more charming, with lots of wood clapboards and black shutters. By producing my official state of New Hampshire press identification card --- complete with a photo almost as unflattering as my driver's license picture --- I wrangled a few minutes with the chief, an amiable man named Roy Tallinn.

Roy had on a white uniform dress shirt and black trousers and black shiny shoes, and the collars on his shirt had four little gold stars on each of them. His office was smaller than Diane's, but considerably neater, and he had a beefy look about him, from his thick wrists to the flesh that spilled out over his shirt collar and red face. His gray hair was buzz-cut short, and he offered me coffee, which I declined.

"
Shoreline
magazine," he mused, rubbing his thick hands together. "Sorry, I can't say that I've ever read an issue. Does it make it up to newsstands up here?"

"Apparently not," I said. "But I could send you over a few sample issues if you'd like."

He ignored my gracious offer. "And you're interested in doing a story about the suicide victim found last night at the state park."

'Tm considering it," I said. "And are you certain it was a suicide?"

He smiled. "Very certain. There was a revolver found on the floor of the car, and a suicide note in the glove box. Fingerprints found on the revolver, and gunpowder residue found on the man's hand. About as straightforward as it gets."

"And you're not releasing the man's name?"

"Standard procedure. It's a suicide. Not a murder, or even an apparent murder."

"And the revolver. On the floorboards, right?"

A slow nod, but the smile was still there. "Right."

"But Chief," I said, trying to keep my voice friendly, "I was there right after your two officers got there. I got a good look in the car. I didn't see a revolver."

His smile seemed to match mine. "Oh, right ... You're the magazine writer that walked in on my guys. Yeah, Lewis Cole. Should have noted that before. Then you must have missed seeing the weapon."

"Yeah, maybe I did," I said, replaying in my mind's eye what I had seen that night, doubting very much that I could have missed seeing a weapon.  “By the way, who were the other responding units there this morning?”

“You meant the State Police Major Crimes Unit?”

"N 0," I said, beginning to feel a bit chilled in this sunny office. "Three other Ford LTDs came in, with six people, a woman and five men. Well-dressed, arrogant, seemed to enjoy shoving their weight around. Looked like feds."

"Hmmm," Tallinn said, slowly going through papers on his desk, looking like a bear that had just woken up from hibernation and was looking for his first meal. "Here we go. Incident report. Hmmm."

As he started reading, I noted that the palms of my hands were getting moist. I wiped them down on my pant leg, just as the chief finished reading. "Sorry, Lewis. No mention of anybody else in my guys' report. The first officer saw the vehicle on routine patrol, and then my second officer responded. A brief mention of you, and then I show up, and then the State Police. There you go. Like I said, pretty straightforward."

"Officer Calhoun and Officer Remick," I said quietly, "are they on duty today?"

The chief’s expression hadn't changed for a moment since I arrived. "No, they're not."

"Will they be in later tonight? Or tomorrow?"

'Tm afraid not," the chief said. "They're both taking some vacation time."

Now I looked back to the office's doorway, gauging if I could make it out to the parking lot in time if the good chief did something silly, like pull his weapon. I kept my voice even. "Gee.  What a coincidence."

A slow nod. "Yes, a coincidence. A nice word."

I tried to see what was going on behind that chief’s merry expression, and I failed. He was good. I said, "What did they offer you?"

He blinked. Maybe that was as good a response as I could expect. "Excuse me, I don't understand what you mean."

"What did they offer you?" I said again. "New cruisers? New weapons? A hefty contribution to the Police Relief Association? Some other goodie to keep it all a secret.  Come on Chief, I was there.  I saw the other people. Saw the three LTDs. I saw it, your cops saw it, and so did the EMTs.”

The chief’s gaze at me didn't waver for a moment. 'Tm not sure what you saw, but my cops and the EMTs didn't see anything unusual last night. And if you try to talk to the fire chief next door, you'll get as much satisfaction as you did here. Which is zero. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?"

Leave, a voice inside of me said. Leave now and be thankful you can get out. I stood up, shook his hand. "Chief, one of these days, it'll come out. I don't know when or where, but it will come out. It might prove pretty embarrassing to you and the department. You can see this as an opportunity to let a member of the press in on what was going on."

A sad shake of his head. "Sorry. There's nothing I can do for you."

I turned and headed out to the office, feeling better with each step taken, and then the chief called out to me. "Lewis?"

"Yes?" I said, turning by the door.

He was still behind his desk. "Want to hear a secret?"

"Sure," I said, wondering what was coming next.

His smile widened. "Four years ago, I cheated on my wife. At a police convention in Atlanta. With a woman SWAT team leader from Oregon. There. Satisfied?"

"Not really," I said, and then I left.

In my Ford I locked the doors and started the engine, and then I started shivering. It wasn't cold, damn it, it wasn't cold at all, but still, the shakes wouldn't stop. I turned on the radio and started listening to the news at the top of the hour from WBZ-AM in Boston, and that calmed me down some. The fifth story in was a ten-second report about last night's successful space shuttle launch, and I wiped my face and hands with my handkerchief, and felt a little better.

This part of North Tyler had the police and fire stations and a little town hall, and a store in a converted train station that was next to the old B & M Railroad tracks. About as peaceful as a place as one could expect, almost as peaceful as the parking lot of the state park, just a few miles away. 

But something had come traipsing into these peaceful areas, something that didn’t belong, something that scared me to death, and something that, for a while, several years ago, I had been a part of.

When my shivering stopped, I drove out of the parking lot and headed home.

My home is across the street from the Lafayette House, near the border between Tyler and North Tyler, and I pulled into the tiny parking lot across from the hotel. A large sign at the entrance said PRIVATE PARKING FOR LAFAYETTE HOUSE ONLY and I went to the north end, passing a few parked cars, BMWs and Volvos and Lexuses. At the end of the lot was a low stone wall with an opening where some of the rocks had fallen free. There was a narrow dirt-covered path there, just wide enough for my Ford. The path went to the right, past two homemade NO TRESPASSING signs, and my home came into view. It's a two-story house that's one step above a cottage and has never been painted and which has a dirt crawl space for a cellar. The scraggly lawn rises up to a steep rocky ledge that hides my home from Atlantic Avenue, and I parked in the sagging shed that serves as my garage.

Inside I had a quick lunch of tomato soup and bread and cheese, and as I ate I watched CNN, hoping against hope that they would have a lengthy update about the shuttle mission and its crew. Instead, they had some sort of legal affairs program, where they dissected yet another court case where an overpaid and undereducated football player got away with murder. As I washed the dishes, looking out to the ocean, I had an odd feeling that I was glad I was near a window that overlooked the empty water. There would be no way that quiet men with long-range binoculars could keep watch on me from that vantage point.

I then retreated upstairs to a nice hot shower, and when I was done I mechanically went through my daily routine of checking my skin for bumps, for swellings, for things that did not belong. As I did this, I also noted the two scars on my left side, one on my left knee and one on my back, near the coccyx.  Daily reminders of how I had come to be here.

I got tired all of a sudden and sat down on the toilet, towel wrapped around my waist. Then the shakes came back and I felt nauseous, and it all came back to me, like a movie in the VCR set on fast forward: my previous career as a research analyst with the Department of Defense, the friends I had made. Carl Socha. Trent Baker. And my darling Cissy Manning. Then a weekend in Nevada. A training mission, trooping around in the desert. We got lost and ended up in the middle of a test range. A test range that didn't officially exist. And out of that group, only one person came out alive.