Standish was wet and gleaming. As I passed shops and houses, heading south, a beach ball rolled along, pushed by the wind. It bounced and floated across the road, moving like something in a dream. The few people I saw out appeared subdued. Rain didn't work in a place like this the way it could in Lowell, where it felt as if it belonged. There it made the buildings look like the hulks of ships that have sunk and are moldering away, made the streets grayer, turned the soot to ink. Here, I imagined that the rain would soon end, and a rainbow would appear and the colors would gleam that much brighter. But I passed a raccoon that lay at the side of the road, sodden and gas-bellied and dead, and I gave up that that notion. With a shudder I thought of St. Onge's story.
At the edge of the soon-to-be Point Pines golf course, I churned the Chevy in close to the gate and parked and got out. For a moment, I shut my eyes and tipped my face up, welcoming the rain, and put my imagination to work.
While his two more rugged classmates went off to be marines, Ben Nickerson had stayed behind to become a marine biologist, in time to meet a lively coed named Paula and marry her and go west and have a child. But before that, one night on a little beachcombing
walk, what if he'd had the blind bad luck to witness something he shouldn't have seen? What? Ted Rand and Ginny Carvalho going out for a moonlight swim? Or Rand coming out of the water alone, looking agitated and furtive? Maybe he had gone back later, looking, and had been reported trespassing and taken in. Maybe he'd told the arresting officerâa young Vin Delcastroâwhat he'd been doing there, and maybe he'd been let go with a warning to keep his nose clean and his mouth shut. Maybe one day he'd realized that a deal had been cutâhis freedom for his silence. Only he wouldn't make the link until years later, when the motivation of a failing business got old wheels turning and he connected the discovery of Ginny Carvalho's body with what he'd spotted a few days prior.
This was my wheel turning, and maybe I was way off. But the timing more or less fit, as did the fact that Ben Nickerson, reading the local paper that he had delivered to him in California each week, couldn't have missed all the hoopla about Rand's Point Pines success. So maybe he'd set up a meeting with Rand and made his pitch: Nickerson's silence againâfor a price. What would Rand do, take him out to swim and drown him? No, Nickerson wouldn't have gone along with it; only I was that dumb. Rand would've been calm and reasonable, said, “Let's talk,” and Nickerson would've agreed, careful to take along a gun when he went. Maybe earlier he'd dropped his daughter at the movies and promised to pick her up, except he hadn't been able to. And poor Jillian Kearns had the bad fortune of looking for love and had bad timing. Was it possible even that had been set up? Her “chance” meeting with Nickerson as Rand's way of keeping tabs on what Ben might be trying to do? I didn't like that part; I wouldn't believe that Jillian had been conniving. More likely she was just a talker, and Rand might have worried that she was talking to a nosy PI and so had to be silenced.
Was I blowing a solo as warped and wiggy as old man Carvalho's? I might as well, if I didn't have something more concrete than paranoia to back it. I wiped rain from my face, walked over to the gate, and put my eyes to work.
The land had been graded and turfed, and it sloped away in long drives and sweeping fairways, skirted around sand traps and roughs of scrub oak and pine, and eased toward eighteen holes as deep and
as soft as cash drawers. Red Dog had said it was seven hundred acres. Was Nickerson buried out there somewhere? Maybe turning up his vehicle would provide an answerâif it wasn't already a cube of rusting steel. But time was ticking away. Michelle Nickerson had been alive to make a phone call last night. I prayed she still was. Any chance I had of finding her had to start with selling Vin Delcastro that I had something solid. The young desk officer I got on the phone told me that the chief was on the job, Ferry, tooâout by the lighthouse, she thought.
I could have taken it easier on the curves. The officer had asked if I wanted her to relay a message, but I hadn't. Delcastro's knowing I was looking for him would only put his ruff up. I wanted an element of surprise. Ahead, I could see the lighthouse, sending its warning out into the rainy dark. As I neared, I came upon a pair of police cars. A speed trap, probably. One cruiser had its lights going, and there was an officer standing alongside it, wearing a rain jacket. I drew up and stopped. It was Ferry. His face had taken on a sharper cast than ever before, alternately shadowed and then washed with blue and white lights from his rooftop strobes. For the first time, he didn't look like just a boy playing dress-up. I climbed out.
“What's the occasion?” I called.
Ferry seemed to have glued his shoes to the ground. He was whey-faced. He looked at me, though I had the distinct feeling I wasn't registering. I glanced toward the second cruiser. No lights going on that one. I looked back at Ferry for an explanation, but he said nothing. The very act of standing seemed to be taxing his reserves. I gave the second cruiser another look and walked toward it. The small number “1” painted on the side confirmed that it was Delcastro's car. The chief was at the wheel. I went nearer, and as I did, I heard a crunch and looked down to see that I was stepping on broken glass. I glanced back at Ferry, who was watching me, but he gave me no sign.
Delcastro, too, ignored me when I tapped on his side window. He sat with his head resting on the brace pad. I'd seen it often enough in Lowell, beat officers catnapping behind a mill building. His mouth even hung open as theirs sometimes did. I leaned close to peer through the rain-streaked glass.
The backup I'd hoped for was null and void. He wasn't sawing logs. In the steady wash of light from the other cruiser's headlights, I saw that blood had run down onto the front of Delcastro's uniform shirt. There was a gaping wound beneath his chin, and his cheeks looked swollen. He wore a freshly laundered uniform, one with several decorations on it. He'd hooked on his aviators, and donned his cap. He needn't have, of course. With fluids and gristle and bone debris, with sphincters letting go, and flesh lumping and going gray, he wasn't going to pass any inspection.
The bullet's impact had jarred the aviators askew and addled his cap in the process of boring a hole through the soft tissues of his mouth, through the firewall of bone, into the serious business the bullet was designed for, and ultimately had passed through the back window of the cruiser, taking out a small web of safety glass, which I'd stepped on. His eyes were open in a confused expression of surprise and recognition. He'd been dead before the blast would've faded from the air.
If a gun went off in a parked car, and there was no one around to hear it �
I felt a spin of nausea, a wrench of remorse. Delcastro had tried to straight-arm me, but then I'd crowded him a little bit, too. He hadn't been a bad guy. Probably he'd made mistakes, but he'd made them early and had found a way to live with them and keep some honor. It was what cops did when they got protective about a town they liked, especially a town with secrets they felt a need to protect. And every town and city had them: secrets and torn cops. The average citizen never saw it, but it was there, and the knowing wasn't always an easy knowledge. I'd kidded Ed St. Onge about it, but there was a brotherhoodâand now a sisterhood, tooâof cops. Peace officers whenever they could be, but sometimes they had to adopt other means. And I grasped that, as well. When you were sworn and wore the badge and the sidearm, you became different from other people; you were someone working out there on the edge on a thin sliver of nerves and courage and training, burdened by the perpetual misunderstanding of everyone else and your own flawed understanding of things around you. You wore death on your hip, and you were sometimes asked to make split-second decisions that saved lives or took lives away, also. Scrap the hype and the
masturbatory bullshit fantasy of power, and there really was a thin blue line.
The Ford's doors were locked. At the scrape of boots on wet gravel, I stepped back.
“I've called it in,” Ferry said, clearing his throat to take the hoarseness out of his voice. It didn't want to go. “He was shot.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He dropped to his hands and knees, and I had the idea that he was going to vomit, or pray. But he was moving his fingertips around on the wet gravel and the broken glass, like a man reading Braille. “What are you doing?”
“Searching for spent casings. Whoever did this stood about here.”
“Hey,” I said softly, “come on.” I reached to help him up, but he shook me off and rose on his own.
“I want the shooter! Look there.” He pointed to a large round hole in the glass.
“I think you'll find that's an exit hole.”
He stared at me in accusation and then horror. “But the door's locked and ⦔ He moaned. I almost thought he was going to lean on me for supportâhe was so close I could smell his English Leather. After a moment, he seemed to pull himself partway together.
“I don't know how you want to run it,” I said. “Your dispatcher is going to put this out. The press is going to pick it up PDQ, and there's no way it'll play as anything but what it is. You with me?”
He stared but did not speak.
“You'd be stupid to try,” I said. “You can maybe come up with a statement that'll make things easier for his family, the town, whatever. Not so easy on you, maybe. Unless I'm wrong, Delcastro was probably a pretty good boss, with a solid résumé of public service.”
Ferry stood slack-jawed and hollow-eyed. Nothing in his textbooks and seminars had readied him for this, or ever could. “Have you got a key?” I asked.
“Key?”
“For his car.” He fished one out of a pouch on his belt. I unlocked and opened the door. The gun was in Delcastro's hand, which hung at his side, a 9-mm or 10-mm, shiny with blood. Blood had
snaked down under his shirtsleeve and ran in a maroon thread across his stiffening fingers. Touching nothing inside, I glanced around for a note, perhaps a hastily torn page from a pocket notebook. I drew the door wider. Ferry saw and took the view numbly for a moment, though it more or less cinched that the wound was self-inflicted. “Cato, falling on his sword,” I murmured.
“What?” It wasn't worth a replay. He cleared his throat again, but the hoarseness had settled in to stay. “Why?”
Was he being dense? Then I realized he was looking for a bigger answer. I thought: Read it yourself. Delcastro is telling us now. Not in words, but there, in the fresh uniform, the cap, the medals. Even in the choice of setting perhaps, a beacon sending a lonely message out into darkness. It bespoke a sense of pride that he'd seen eroded. Delcastro tried to work a compromise with his integrity, and maybe he'd finessed it to fit, but then Nickerson had come to town, and I'd come around asking questions, nosing into things that didn't want disturbing, and in the end Delcastro hadn't been able to hang on.
Unlike a Grady Stinson, who would whine and blame others till his final old-age breath and still be clueless, Delcastro had kept a personal and professional honor. But there is no acid so corrosive as our fallen estimation of our once-good name. No slow slide down into the lush life for him, no excuses, and no noteânot here, at least. There might be something elsewhere, a loving word for his family, or for the citizens of his town, whose welfare and safety he'd always had in mind and who probably took him for granted, never thinking to question him or ask how
he
was doing, really doing, deep down, because cops were not thought to be vulnerable in the way other people are. But he'd succumbed to temptation: a temptation that had come from only one hand, and I knew whose. I could blame myselfâhell, there was blame to go aroundâbut I saw a hand pointing as directly as the hand on the stairway at the town hall, or the bloody hand there in the car. I confirmed with Ferry that backup was indeed on the way, then I started toward my car.
“Mr. Rasmussen?”
He looked lost there in the pin-wheeling lights with his raincoat and his polished boots. “What ⦔ He cleared his throat. “What do I do now?”
“You're doing it. Some flares by that curve might be a good idea. Secure the scene, and hang on until backup arrives.” Which wouldn't be long; I could hear already the impressive whine of a fast-approaching siren. “Good luck.”
“Sir?”
I turned again.
“That information you asked me to check ⦠the autopsy reportâI found it.”
Our gazes locked a moment, and I saw his almost imperceptible nod and I knew that he was going to be okayâdifferent from yesterday, when he'd been five years youngerâbut okay. The jitters were steadying.
“What does it say?”
He nodded toward his cruiser. “It's on the front seat.”
It was in a large envelope, which I took to my vehicle and opened. It didn't take long to read, but then I didn't have to read far before one sentence grabbed me. For a moment, I stared at it with a growing sense of understanding, then I put the report back into the envelope and set it aside. The past was unraveling faster than I'd imagined it might. I'd been a lot younger yesterday, too. It was the looming present, however, that I had to concern myself with now.