“He would have paid it. He’d loved Dolly since he was eight years old. If it meant shutting down my investigation, I have no doubt that he would have paid it. None.”
Crowther got up out of his chair and began to pace around the room with his hands in his pockets, distractedly jangling his coins and keys. He finally came to a stop, gazing at her sternly. “Do you want to know what I think?”
“Yessir, I do.”
“I think I’m not going to tell anybody we had this conversation. I think you’re a good officer who got a raw deal. And I think this flap with I.A. will blow over. In fact, I’m prepared to guarantee it will.”
Outwardly, Des’s expression remained guarded and serious. Inwardly, she was doing cartwheels. Because she wasn’t wrong. Not about any of it.
“When it does,” he went on, “I want you reassigned to my team. Politically, it will be good for both of us. I can help your career. And you can help me in the minority community. You come across very well. You’re an extremely telegenic, well-spoken young lady. I especially like your hair.”
“You do?” Des absolutely could not believe they were talking about her hair.
“I do,” he said earnestly. “It conveys that you’re someone who’s new and modern. Someone who understands what’s going on out there.” Now the superintendent smiled at her tightly, as if it were causing him great pain. Possibly, it was. “So you see, Lieutenant, where the rubber hits the road, we both want the same things.”
“Do we?” she asked him challengingly.
He narrowed his eyes at her again. “Don’t we?”
“I really don’t know, sir. Because I don’t believe this case is closed. I believe the murderer’s still out there, walking around. And I believe you know it, too. And that’s the part I will never, ever be able to accept.”
Now Superintendent Crowther glared at her, a vein in his temple beginning to bulge. “Let me spell something out for you, Lieutenant,” he said in a low, menacing voice. “If you’re not my friend you’re my enemy. And you don’t ever want me for an enemy. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly. Thank you for your candor, sir. And your time. Good day.” Des started for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going, young lady? We’re not done talking-!”
She left him there in that banquet room. She didn’t stop. She didn’t look back. She just marched back down the long corridor to the lobby with her head held high. She was elated. She was smiling. She was definitely smiling.
But the hair would absolutely have to go.
“Awesome move on your part,” Mitch Berger said admiringly as he sat there across the table from Des, hunched over his soup. “You’ve got Dolly for the Weems killings. You’ve got the head guy of the entire state police admitting to a thirty-year-old cover-up. This is major stuff. There’s only one problem with it.”
“What’s that?” she demanded.
He reached for a hunk of bread and tore into it, chewing with his mouth open. “Dolly didn’t kill Niles Seymour or Torry Mordarski or Tuck Weems. I’m positive.”
The Black Pearl was on Bannister’s Wharf in what had once been a sail loft. There was a formal dining room called the Commodore’s Room. And there was the casual and boisterous tavern, where she’d found Mitch slurping up his third bowl of fragrant New England clam chowder, a napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt. When the man ate soup he sounded remarkably like a drain unstopping. There was a huge basket of bread and a schooner of beer in front of him. He seemed positively starved.
Des ordered coffee when the waitress appeared.
Mitch was aghast. “No chowder? You’ve got to have the chowder. It’s a sacrilege not to. Tell her it’s a sacrilege,” he commanded the waitress.
“You’ll go straight to hell, honey,” said the waitress, nodding.
“Just coffee,” said Des.
The waitress went off to get it.
Mitch peered at her across the table. “You don’t eat when you’re tense, am I right?”
She nodded reluctantly.
“Me, I eat like crazy. Which I guess explains why you look the way you do and I look the way I do. This is a big difference between us.”
“Well, what do you know-we found one,” said Des, wondering how he’d look if she cleaned him up. Say, three months on the treadmill. No between-meal snacks, a decent set of threads, proper haircut… Then what would she have?
An average-looking white man who’s hungry all the time, that’s what.
When her coffee came she took a sip, shaking her head at him. “If Dolly Seymour isn’t our killer, then why did Tal Bliss go and kill himself?”
“For the very reason you gave,” Mitch answered. “He was afraid that you’d unearth the truth about Dolly murdering Tuck’s parents. He took his own life so as to short-circuit your investigation. That much is true. But there’s much more to it than that. A boatload more.
“What are you telling me-that Bliss did kill them?”
“Yes and no.”
“Man, don’t talk at me in riddles.”
“It’s like I was telling you-it all comes back to the Fibonacci Series.”
“And don’t you start gas-facing me about geometry either, because I am so trying not to hear that.”
“You have to hear it,” Mitch insisted. “It’s a law. Not your kind of law, but a fundamental principle of proportion based upon-”
“I know, I know. The Golden Section. Which is…?”
“Which is a line that’s divided such that the lesser portion is to the greater as the greater is to the whole.”
“Which means…?”
“The Fibonacci Series is an algebraic variation in which each number represents the sum of the two preceding numbers. So instead of counting out one, two, three, four, five, you count out one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one and so on. Get it?”
Des thought about this long and hard before she said, “No, Mitch. I don’t.”
“Okay, here it is,” he explained. “Two men acting together are capable of doing something that’s twice as heinous as a man who is acting alone. When you add a third man you’re not just adding another player. You’re ratcheting up the disease quotient-each man’s capacity for evil represents the sum total of the previous players combined. Add a fourth and you’re taking a quantum leap over into the dark side. Add a fifth and you’ve got yourself a lynch mob. It’s a law of human nature, Lieutenant. It explains the insanity of mob rule. It explains the atrocities of war. And it explains what happened on Big Sister Island. Hell, it’s the only way this whole crazy thing does make any sense.”
She gaped at him in disbelief. “You’re saying that every man on Big Sister was in on it, is that it?”
“And Tuck Weems, too. Don’t forget Tuck-he played a very valuable role.” Mitch paused to take a gulp of his beer, swiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “We can exclude Evan. He wouldn’t have fingered Bliss as the man who locked me in the crawl space if he had played any part in this. And we can for sure eliminate Dolly, Bitsy and Mandy. This was strictly a guy thing. The ultimate act of male chauvinism, if you stop and think about it. They felt Dolly was too fragile and misguided to make the right choice, so they made it for her. Are you with me so far?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m with you,” Des said doubtfully. “But I’m listening.”
Mitch leaned forward in his chair, his eyes gleaming at her. “Okay, here’s what we know. We know that Bud Havenhurst hated Niles Seymour for stealing Dolly away. We know that Red Peck, her big brother, hated Niles because he was a low-class con man who roughed her up-and wanted to build condos on Big Sister. Jamie Devers hated him for killing Evan’s dog, not to mention his constant gay-bashing. And Tal Bliss wanted him gone because he wanted Dolly for himself. It was he who recruited Tuck Weems, a man who had already threatened to kill Niles for beating up on Dolly.”
“But why would Tuck come rushing to her defense?” Des objected. “Dolly’s the one who murdered his parents.”
