'Who was that?' April asked, as if she didn't know.
'Bellaqua. Wendy hasn't moved or called anyone since last night. Ditto Louis. Tito's in the hot seat downtown. They'll work on him all day. She wants us to keep in touch and get with her later this afternoon at One PP.'
April peered out the little window. Martha's Vineyard was about two hundred and forty miles, not that far, but ahead of her she could see a line of jets assembling for their eight o'clocks to wherever.
They didn't have all day. Yesterday, she'd taken a chance in the interview room and kept her questioning real general because she hadn't wanted to alert Wendy. Sometimes they talked around and around a subject, never hitting the nail on the head. In this case Wendy was holding out on them big-time. April didn't want her calling her mystery assistant, or getting on the road in the BMW herself. She hoped she knew what she was doing.
She turned to Mike with a little smile, remembering their search of Louis's place. They'd come up with a few fancy sex toys, but nothing of a more sinister nature than that. The detectives who tossed Tito's rented room in a small house found
magazines, but no guns. He said he liked to look at the pictures.
The nineteen seats filled up. Affluent people with a certain look. Expensive khaki clothes, expensive casual carry-on bags. Buff people, Wendy's kind of people, fit and secure. And used to the drill. Only April and Mike were tapping their watches.
'Jesus, look at that. We're never getting out of here.' April pointed out the planes lining up on the runway.
'We'll be fine.' Mike squeezed her hand, always the optimist.
Finally, the door was closed. The two propeller engines sputtered to life, and the Tinkertoy plane taxied out sounding like something from World War II. Not too many minutes later, the copilot rattled off safety instructions and the little commuter took its place on the runway between jumbo giants off to faraway places.
Taking off, the plane teetered from side to side, fighting rising winds. At a hundred feet it hung there, engines throbbing. April watched the jets ahead of them soar up and away. Then the plane bounced a few times like a jeep off-road, losing altitude before it began to fight its way higher. Her empty stomach lurched. She clutched the arm of her seat and concentrated on the changing views: Rikers Island, the new Manhattan skyline, the George Washington Bridge receding behind them. Long Island and the coast opening out ahead.
Forty-seven
F
or forty-five minutes the little commuter bounced around in bumpy air. Then a patch of green appeared ahead in choppy, whitecapped water and grew larger undl it reached the size of Manhattan. The turbulence increased as they went inland and down. The plane seesawed as it came down and connected hard with the ground twice before finally settling into a jerky taxi toward a toy-sized airport.
'Welcome to Martha's Vineyard, and thanks for flying American Eagle,' the pilot announced.
April saw the police cruiser parked on the runway and unhooked her seat belt with a little sigh of relief. The local sheriff was waiting for them as he had promised. As soon as she and Mike broke away from the other disembarking passengers and headed his way, he stuck out a paw. If he felt any surprise by the New York team, he didn't show it.
'You got here right on schedule. Bert Whitmore, at your service.' The sheriff was five-ten, heavy build, wearing a khaki uniform with a considerable belly protruding over his belt, bristly gray hair growing out well past the crew-cut stage, sharp blue eyes.
'Lieutenant Sanchez and Sergeant Woo. Thanks for coming out for us,' Mike said.
'No trouble at all. We don't get too many requests from Nu Yawk. We have a lot of respect for you folks, what you did last fall. Anything to help.' Whitmore smiled at April. 'You the one who called me last night?'
'Yes, sir.'
'You didn't tell me much.' He waved his hand at the new-looking cruiser with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts seal on the front doors. It was real clean and neat, had a cage separating the front and back seats, and all the modern technology. 'What's your time line?' he asked.
'We're going back out at fifteen hundred. You okay with that?' Mike asked.
'Anything you want is okay with me. I'm here to help.' Whitmore glanced back at the wind socks on the runway, snapping hard in a rising wind and deepening haze. He shrugged big shoulders, then climbed stiffly into the car. 'You'll be fine getting out if the weather holds.'
'What if the weather doesn't hold?' Mike asked, checking his watch, then opening the front passenger door for April.
'Ferry to Woods Hole. Bus to Baaston or Hyannis. Or you can wait it out.'
Cold, wet air gusted at them. April shivered and shook her head. Spring was several weeks behind here; maybe they wouldn't get home as easily as they got here. She chose the backseat, happy to let Mike do the talking for the moment. His hand grazed hers as she climbed into the back.
'You're here about those wedding shootings down there, huh? Terrible thing. One of you want to fill me in?' The sheriff started the engine and drove around a fortune in private planes parked in a grid next to the runway like cars in a big lot.
'How long have you been on the job, Sheriff?' Mike asked.
'Call me Bert. Going on nineteen years now,' he said.
'You know a family up here called Lotte?'
'Oh, sure. Over on Lake Tashmoo. The little lady told me you wanted to go out there and take a look.'
'You had a shooting incident there back about seventeen years. Do you remember anything about that?'
'Sure, I do. I went to grammar school with Barry Wood. We looked into it pretty carefully because of the sticky situation.' The cruiser bumped off the field onto the service road and threaded through a bunch of buildings that looked like army barracks. At the entrance to the airport, he turned left onto a road that was empty but for cars leaving the airport.
'What kind of situation?'
'Missus Lotte took up with Barry's father, and there was a lot of bad feeling between the families over the divorce. Barry and Wendy went away to school. Then in college during the summers the two were running around the island together, getting into trouble.'
'Oh, what kind of trouble?'
'Oh, you know, the usual kind of thing for here. Vineyard Haven is a dry town. They'd run into Oak Bluffs and get beer, drink out on the beach, light firecrackers. Once they set off a rocket across the cut. It set the beach grass on fire and burned out a couple acres.' He thought about it for a few moments.
'They weren't malicious, though. They alerted the fire department right away. Otherwise we could have lost a couple of houses out there. Everything's shingle on the beach, and pretty much everywhere else, too.' He let out a chortle. 'And they grew Mary Jane out in the vegetable garden. Those two were pretty wild for here, and their families, too.'
He turned left again at a four-way intersection with a blinking yellow light. The weather was deteriorating fast. Fog rolled in at around a hundred feet April could see it move forward like a wall. Unlike New York, where it just thickened the air until you couldn't see the tops of the buildings.
'What about the shooting?' Mike asked.
They passed a farm with fields just planted, houses, all gray shingle with shutters. Now they were on a main road with fancy SUVs and only white people driving them. April tried to imagine Wendy's life here as a kid growing up. A few miles on they turned left again, passed a cemetery, a grocery store, a couple of small strip malls. Then a sudden deep curve in the road brought them to a grassy hill overlooking a cove with bobbing sailboats below and they were in picture-postcard land.
'This here is the inland side of the lake.'
They passed a horse farm with barns and an elegant white clapboard house, and soon turned onto a dirt road. Bert resumed his story.
'Wendy cleaned up pretty good after she went to college. No more trouble before the shooting. They had a
