Nantucket Grand (18 page)

I checked his e-mail—Gmail and Hotmail, his Twitter feed, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, but it was just like he had told me at the State Police HQ. There was no activity of any kind recorded for the night in question. I checked the desk drawers, on the off-chance that there might be a diary, as Dan's bitter little joke had suggested. But of course there wasn't.

“Give up?” Dan asked.

“Pretty much,” Charlie answered.

I stepped back to view the whole room.

And then I figured it out. It wasn't what was on the computer that mattered. It was which way the computer screen faced. I turned to Dan. “I think I have an idea.”

“Thank God someone does,” said Marian.

***

Back at the station, I put in a call to Washington, DC. I had kept the number on speed dial (number four), though I never thought I'd call it again, the same way I still hadn't deleted my father's address from my e-mail contacts. It gave me a strange fleeting comfort to see it there, in alphabetical order with all the living people, as if in some cat-tangled string theory world he were still alive and still threatening to throw his phone into the swimming pool. Or maybe he had already made good on the threat and that's why I couldn't reach him anymore. It was farfetched, but it beat the truth.

I sat down at my desk, enclosed in the luxurious cocoon of my grand new office and touched the four on the screen of my hand-me-down iPhone. I waited while it rang, emptying my mind, focusing on the soft burr in my ear. I got her voicemail, which redirected me to her office number. That same sharp, sexy authoritative contralto. I let it work through me like the first draw on a cigarette (four years and counting since the last time I smoked one), then punched in her work number.

“Office of Homeland Security.”

I cleared my throat. “Frances Tate, please.”

“One moment.”

Mozart played while I waited.

“Frances Tate's office.”

“Is she there?”

“She's in a meeting. May I say who's calling?”

“It's Police Chief Henry Kennis from Nantucket.” I don't know why I added my title. Maybe to prove I was part of the law enforcement community, marginally more deserving of Franny's time than some random citizen. “This won't take long, but it's important.”

“One moment.”

More Mozart—the Sinfonia Concertante. I listened to the sparkling conversation of the violin and the viola, remembering that my mom had won a canned ham for identifying this piece—some little contest on the NPR station in Connecticut where she lived when I was at college. She recognized it from the first few notes, like greeting an old friend. The ham was just the fortune cookie after the meal. But it turned out to be delicious.

“Hank?”

The sound of her voice, living and alert at the other end of the line, snapped me out of my reverie. No one else ever called me Hank. I smiled. “The Mayor of Whoville, at your service.”

She laughed. “You'll never let me live that one down.”

“Nope.”

“So…are you calling to tell me you've had it with the rustics and you're moving to DC? We could use a few cops who think before they shoot.”

“No, sorry.”

“Then…you're begging me to move to Nantucket and hunt down the bake shop cookie thieves with you.”

“That would be hopeless.”

“So you need a favor.”

“Yeah.”

“Spit it out, Hank. I have a homeland to secure down here. Speaking of which…are you in the loop on the big INS sweep of the island?”

“Uh—no. In fact—”

“It's just a rumor, so maybe it's nothing, But I've heard they're going to be running the crackdown of all time out there. Every business, every private employer—arrests, deportations. It sounds like the Japanese internment program. You should check it out.”

“I will. Meanwhile…do you know anyone at the NSA?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess so.”

“You guess so?”

“I—it's a little—”

“You're dating someone from the NSA.”

She made breathed out a soft laugh. “Match wits with Inspector Kennis.”

“It's okay. I'm sort of dating someone, too.”

“That's great, Henry.”

“Another writer.” I wondered what Jane would think of my classifying our sporadic private literary salon as a form of dating. It might be worthwhile to find out.

“Oh, my God, I can see it now, both of you banging away at opposite sides of the dining room table. Dueling laptops.”

“We're not quite there yet.”

“Good.”

“Can you ask the NSA dude for a favor?”

“We're not quite there yet, either.”

“It's important.”

I could hear her pull in a breath. “What's going on, Hank?”

I told her about Mason and Oscar Graham, the arrest and the false confession. “But here's the thing. Mason has gotten politically conscious this year, writing articles for the school paper and letters to the
Inky Mirror
and blog posts about drone strikes and surveillance and putting Cat Stevens on the no-fly list. Anyway, the point is…he's got to have been flagged by the NSA. He wrote one piece asking how Obama would feel if ISIS started bombing farms and kindergarten playgrounds and weddings in America. Just putting the word Obama and bomb together in one paragraph would start the alarms ringing. Am I right?”

“Probably.”

“And we both know that the NSA can conduct surveillance through the camera function on your computer.”

“Thanks to Edward Snowden.”

“Yeah. Thanks to Edward Snowden.” She let that one pass, but I knew she took the party line on the exiled leaker. “Mason's computer faces his bed. If the NSA is monitoring him, they have footage that proves he was home and asleep at the time of the murder.”

“And you think they'll just hand it over to you?”

“I was hoping they might hand it over to…to—”

“Mark. Mark Hennesey.”

“Right—to him. Then he'd hand it over to you, and you'd hand it over to me. Something like that.”

“This is your craziest idea yet, Horton.”

“A person's a person, no matter how small. Look—Mason needs help. He's in trouble. He matters.”

“Not to the NSA.”

“But he should.”

“This is classified information.”

“So, why not use it to help someone, for once?”

“I don't know, I don't know, Henry. This is too weird.”

“Will you at least ask him?”

“Okay, but no promises.”

***

We hung up and I turned to other business: a rash of burglaries, just discovered by returning homeowners, someone suing the NPD because they slipped on the ice in the parking lot during the winter. And the forensics report on the Thayer house fire, long delayed in Boston, had finally landed on my desk. It indicated that the house contained a lot of high-end filmmaking equipment—cameras, editing bays, microphones, lighting gear. That didn't prove Alana's theory—they could have been making totally innocuous movies out there, or even just storing the stuff—but it raised a red flag for me.

The report identified the camera as a high Definition XF305 Canon camcorder, list price around seven thousand dollars. Not a hobbyist's item. You could pick up a serviceable digital camera at Staples for under a hundred bucks; or just use your phone. The State Police arson forensics unit had managed to pull a partial serial number off the unit and they attached a list of seven hundred and eighty-two people in New England who had purchased this particular model, and filed the warranty papers. People came to Nantucket from all over the country, and most people didn't bother with warranty applications anyway. But it was a start. The list of names gave me something useful to do.

On a hunch, I saved the list as a Microsoft Word file and ran a search for the name Chick Crosby.

Bingo.

So it was his equipment. I told Barnaby Toll to set up an appointment and started scrolling through the rest of my inbox. The local film director Mark Toland had sent me the photographs he took on the day Andrew Thayer's cottage burned down. I printed them out and studied them. The attached note apologized for the poor quality of shots. He was moving fast, clicking impulsively, not really sure what he was looking for beyond a sense of the moors as a possible location for his next movie. Alana featured in one shot, posing awkwardly; I could see the tailgate of the F-150 in another. Otherwise, it was just bushes and trees and blue sky. I saved one particularly blurry picture out for Haden Krakauer—it showed red specks on the turf. Cardinals probably, feeding on whatever they could find there. The cardinal was a common bird on Nantucket, but you rarely saw them in groups like that.

I was about to leave the office when the phone rang again.

I picked up. “Chief Kennis.”

“Can't do it, Hank.”

“Come on.”

“Mark could go to jail.”

“For helping someone.”

“For releasing classified information.”

I blew out a breath. Around and around we go. “For God's sake, Franny! It's the video feed of a sleeping teenager.”

“And if that teenager shoots up his high school next week? Or joins ISIS?”

“What if he does? How does me having three hours of sleep footage change anything?”

“It's sloppy. It's a mistake. It's a protocol infraction. Senate oversight committees start asking—what other infractions did this guy commit? What other top-secret information did he share with his girlfriend? And who else did she share it with?”

“He can't just borrow the footage and lie about it?”

“I can't believe you'd even ask that. Or ask me to.”

“It's three hours of meaningless video. No one will care.”

“You'd be surprised at the things the NSA cares about. When they start asking questions, you better have the right answers.”

“So, he's just covering his ass.”

“Technically, no. Technically, he's choosing not to risk his ass in the first place to help some small-town cop prove his harebrained theory and get a gold star from the Selectmen. The kid's father is a Selectman, right?”

“How did you remember that?”

“I'm sitting in front of a computer, Hank.”

“Right, of course.” I felt a quick stab of irritation, picturing her clicking away at the keyboard, while we talked. “Splitting the difference,” as she called it. I wondered briefly if I'd ever gotten her undivided attention, if anyone ever did, if there even was such a thing anymore.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked me.

“I'm going to be persistent and annoying, like always.”

“Oh, boy. Here it comes.”

“The night of May twenty-third. Ten o'clock to two in the morning. Just ask Mark to pull the footage and review it. He doesn't have to send it to me, or give it to you. It never has to leave his encrypted computer database. Then if he sees the kid coming in after midnight dripping wet, he can help us convict this kid and take a potential terrorist off the street before he plants a bomb somewhere. It's a win-win.”

“But you're absolutely certain he's innocent.”

“Maybe they'll catch him talking about ISIS in his sleep.”

“If he talks about ISIS in his sleep, they already caught him. That's why the surveillance was set up in the first place.”

“Okay, Mark won't help you. But you can still help me.”

“Hank—”

“Just back me up on this, if Lonnie calls you. Which he won't.”

“How can you know that?”

“I don't—I mean, I'm ninety-nine percent sure. But I worry about that one percent.”

“Me, too. In fact that's my job description.”

“Look, if he calls, just say something cryptic. Tell him everything's classified, that's not even a lie.”

“What kind of scheme are you cooking up in that overheated little brain of yours?”

I told her about Lonnie's use of the Reid Technique. “I'm going to do to Lonnie exactly what he did to Mason with the polygraph and that imaginary ‘eyewitness.' I'm going to run my own ‘alt key' experiment.”

She laughed. “I like it. Poetic justice.”

“My favorite kind.”

***

The next day I met Lonnie Fraker at the Green for lunch. He always said the wheat grass smoothies there were one of the few consolations for being posted on Nantucket. He ordered one. I took a slice of vegan gluten-free pizza and an iced tea. I would have preferred a burger at the LolaBurger but Lonnie was on a health food kick and I wanted to humor him. We sat down on the uncomfortable couch at the low table by the back door, surrounded by yoga moms and ex-hippie cabinetmakers.

“You don't have an eyewitness for the Mason Taylor case,” I said. “In fact, you don't have a case at all.”

“Dream on, Chief, I know you like the kid, but—”

“I called Frannie Tate. She has connections at the NSA. We have surveillance footage from his computer camera. It shows him home and in bed the whole time.”

He stared at me, looking for the “tells” he'd learned at his Reid training course, no doubt. “I want to see the footage.”

“Impossible.”

“This is bullshit.”

“I haven't seen it myself, Lonnie. But Frannie has the report. The footage will be used by the defense and shown to the judge, in chambers, during discovery. But by then it will be too late. You'll have railroaded an innocent kid into a murder trial with trumped up evidence, and a false confession from a discredited interrogation technique. They'll come down on you like a rotten roof in a blizzard. Kiss this job goodbye. You'll be directing traffic on Lyman Street in Springfield. If they let you stay on the force at all. No one wants this kind of publicity.”

Lonnie gulped his wheatgrass. “So the kid's just lying there, doing nothing?”