explained. “To make sure she wasn’t wandering. She does, as I believe I’ve mentioned to you.”
“You didn’t mention that you were soaking wet when you got home. How did you get so wet, Mr. Havenhurst?”
“I walked on the beach.”
“In the middle of a violent rainstorm?”
“I like to walk in the rain. I find it therapeutic.”
“Are you in need of therapy?”
“Everyone is in need of therapy.”
And these were supposed to be the happy people. Had their own damned island. If they weren’t happy, who was? “Did anyone see you?” she asked.
“No, of course not.”
Just as no one could recall seeing his son, Evan, and Jamie Devers docked out on Little Sister Island having themselves a bonfire. She had checked with the Coast Guard. She had checked with the boatyards. Nothing. Everywhere she turned it came up nothing.
Havenhurst abruptly glanced at his watch. “I really have to be getting to my law office, Lieutenant. A number of my later appointments got pushed up to this morning because of Niles Seymour’s funeral this afternoon. Are we done?”
“Not a problem,” Des said agreeably. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from your appointments. The big wheel of justice must keep on turning.” She climbed to her feet and treated him to her maximum-wattage smile. “But, counselor, I would not be saying we’re done.”
CHAPTER 13
“HONEY, I’M HOME!” MITCH called out as he came charging in the door.
And bright-eyed little Clemmie was right there, slipping and sliding her way across the wooden floor to greet him. She seemed kind of clumsy for a cat, in his opinion. In fact, she was so adept at tripping over her own feet that Mitch was starting to think she might have a future as a starting wide receiver for the New York Giants. He picked her up. Petted her. Told her how much he’d missed her, managing to discover yet again just how sharp her young teeth were.
He could not believe how happy he was to be back. To smell the sea air. To be in his little house on Big Sister Island. He could not believe it.
The lieutenant had been there some time earlier that morning. Mitch knew this because Clemmie’s litter box was clean. Also because the lieutenant had left a highly prized possession of her own behind on his desk.
Her portfolio.
She had set it there without fanfare. No note. No fuss. Just wham, here it is. This, Mitch concluded, was the woman’s style.
Inside, he found two dozen charcoal drawings that had been torn out of a sketch pad and loosely gathered. Mitch was not sure what to expect. The only time he’d observed her at work she’d been parked out on the bridge sketching what he’d assumed to be a landscape. He didn’t know what her art would be about. Had no idea what it would show him.
What it showed him was pure horror.
Faces that were smashed and contorted and frozen. Innocent lives that had been destroyed by violence and hate and the evil that men and women do to each other. What it showed him, one drawing after another, was the soul of an artist. Lieutenant Mitry was trying to cleanse herself of the destruction she saw in her daily life. To capture it. To understand it. And she had-her drawings jumped right off the page. They were breathtaking in their visceral impact. They were positively haunting. Leafing through them, Mitch was reminded of the tabloid crime photographs of Weegie. But there was more to the lieutenant’s drawings than that. Within them, Mitch found both the noirish foreboding of Edward Hopper and the violent spiritual anguish of Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian impressionist who gave the world The Scream. Within them, he found a vision that was uniquely her own.
Dead people. She drew nothing but dead people. All except for the last one Mitch came to. This one was a portrait of a living man whose face was a wretched mask of pain, his eyes hollow and etched with sorrow. As Mitch stared at it, he realized with a shudder that it was a portrait of himself.
He immediately gathered her drawings back up, jumped in his pickup and headed for Dorset’s graceful, tree- lined historic district. Several cruisers, marked and unmarked, were parked out in front of the white, wood-framed town hall. Also a television news crew van. Mitch left the portfolio on the seat of his truck and went inside, where he was nearly bowled over by the smell of musty old carpeting. The office of the first selectman, the village’s equivalent of a mayor, was just inside the front door. His desk was positioned out in the middle of the room and his door was open. A quaint old Yankee custom-anyone who wanted to speak his or her mind just had to walk in, sit down and start talking. Right now, that anyone was a freshly minted J-school grad who looked remarkably like an eleven-year-old child wearing Lesley Stahl’s clothing and hair. A cameraman was stationed in the doorway, capturing their conversation on video, the lights from his camera bathing the office in artificial brightness. The first selectman, a wheezy white-haired man with an extremely red nose, looked very unhappy.
Lieutenant Mitry’s temporary command center was located down the hall in the conference room. Here Mitch found a hive of activity. Four uniformed troopers talking on telephones, two more pecking away at computers. Files and evidence reports were stacked everywhere. Lieutenant Mitry was locked in grim conversation with her short, muscular sergeant. It was he who noticed Mitch first.
“Help you?” he grunted, eyeballing Mitch’s fat lip with chilly suspicion.
“I’ll take this,” she broke in quickly, crossing the room toward Mitch. “What have you got for me?”
“Something out in my truck that you left behind.”
Her gaze narrowed, her almond-shaped eyes studying his anxiously. “I’ll be back in a sec, Rico,” she said.
They went out the door together.
“Quite some number Mandy did on your lip,” she observed, as they strolled out into the sunshine, the midday sun glinting off her freshly oiled dreadlocks. “You look like you were in a head-on collision.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Lieutenant-I was.”
“Funny, she didn’t have a scratch on her.”
“That’s because I’m a gentleman.”
“That’s not what she said.”
Mitch frowned. “Why, what did she say?”
“Bud Havenhurst was in the city yesterday, too,” the lieutenant mentioned, sidestepping him.
“I thought he hated the city.”
“He may hate it, but he was there.”
“Interesting. Find out anything else?”
“The forensic entomologist discovered no insect life on Niles Seymour’s remains that’s inconsistent with the life found on Big Sister.”
“Meaning he was killed on the island?”
“Meaning there’s nothing to indicate he wasn’t,” she replied. “Toxicology turned up a little something on Tuck Weems-the man was flying high when he died.”
“Marijuana?”
“And booze. Blood alcohol level of point two-six percent-more than twice the legal limit. I’m doubting he could have driven his truck down to the beach in that condition.”
“What does that suggest to you?”
“That he split a fifth of Jack D on the beach with his killer before he got himself done.”
“In the pouring rain?”
“Okay, in the front seat.”
“Did you find a bottle anywhere?”
“Nope.”
