all grouped together in the Historic District. Mornings were always chaotic. A ton of busses and rushed parents pulling in and out at once. For the first week or so, Dorset’s resident state trooper had to stand out there in the middle of Dorset Street directing traffic. It was a far cry from Des Mitry’s heyday as a homicide lieutenant on the Major Crime Squad. One of only three in the entire state who were women. And the only one who was black. And the daughter of Deputy Superintendent Buck Mitry-the Deacon-who was the highest-ranking officer of color in the history of the Connecticut State Police. But, hey, she was totally fine with her new station in life. Just wasn’t ready for fall yet. Today sure hadn’t felt like fall. It had topped out at a sweltering ninety-four degrees. But Labor Day was less than ten days away. Teachers would be showing up for faculty orientation on Monday morning. The calendar didn’t lie.
Thwacketa-thwacketa-thwacketa…
Des slid the schedules into her briefcase, allowing herself a weary sigh. It had been a brutal three weeks. Working seven days a week around the clock. She needed a blow. A nice long, lazy weekend. But she wasn’t going to get one. Not until she nailed him.
The Dorset Flasher had exposed himself to seven elderly women in the Historic District over the previous two weekends. All of them wealthy, well-connected widows. He’d struck on Saturday and Sunday nights between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. That first weekend, he’d rung their doorbells. When they answered there he was-in all of his glory. After word of his exploits got around, not one dowager in Dorset would answer her doorbell after dark. So the sick bastard had taken to waving his thing at them through their windows or sliding-glass doors. Des didn’t have a very solid description of him. Frightened, indignant old ladies didn’t make the greatest eyewitnesses. Plus he operated in the dark of night. All she knew was that he was of average height and weight. He appeared to be reasonably fit. He dressed in dark clothing and wore a black ski mask over his face. Des knew zero about his age or appearance. The old dears couldn’t-or wouldn’t-provide her with any helpful details regarding the particular part of his anatomy that he’d been so anxious to show them. Questioning them about it? Not Des’s idea of a good time.
There had been two additional acts of malicious mischief in the Historic District on the very same nights that the Dorset Flasher had struck. A sign in front of the Fulton Funeral Home had been defaced. And a dead skunk had been left on Amy Orr’s welcome mat. Des had no evidence that the same perp was responsible. Possibly there was no connection between the events at all. But her instincts told her it was the same nutso. Dorset was a very small town. It was also an affluent, picture-postcard town. A serial flasher exposing himself to rich old ladies was just the kind of story that Connecticut’s local TV news stations ate up. They were all over the Dorset Flasher case. And all up in Des’s grille. They weren’t the only ones. A lot of Dorseteers were afraid to go out at night. She was under a lot of heat to nail the sick bastard. Translation: Dorset’s noodge of a first selectman, Bob Paffin, was in her face even more than usual.
Thwacketa-thwacketa-thwacketa…
As she stood there in her sweltering little office, Des could feel the sweat trickling down her legs. She could not wait to floor it out to Mitch’s place, strip off her uni and dive into the cool blue water of Long Island Sound. She was giving herself the evening off tonight. One evening to enjoy a cold beer and a nice meal. To feel Mitch’s deft, sure hands on her. To relax and stretch and…
“Have you got any news for me, Des?”
Busted, damn it.
Dorset’s snowy-haired, red-nosed first selectman stood planted right there in her doorway. “Folks are getting awful darned anxious,” he reminded her. Bob Paffin was real helpful that way.
“I have nothing to tell you, Bob.”
Which didn’t satisfy him. “I need to be able to tell them that you’re making good progress.”
“Bob, we’ll be out there with three extra cruisers tomorrow night. Believe me, the state police are taking this case very, very seriously.”
Short of assigning a detective to it. But the state had limited resources and its detectives were swamped with far more serious cases. The Dorset Flasher hadn’t raped or otherwise assaulted anyone. Hadn’t broken into a home. Hadn’t stolen or destroyed anything of value. The sad reality was that he rated as nothing more than a high-profile nuisance. Which Des was totally fine with. She felt certain she’d nail him faster than any outside detective would. She’d cultivated strong contacts among Dorset’s many stoned and disaffected young people. The Dorset Flasher, she felt certain, was one of them.
Bob Paffin stood there with a pained expression on his long, narrow face. “Des, you know I have every confidence in your ability.
…”
Actually, what she knew was that Bob had gone over her head to Don Rundle, her troop commander, and complained about the piss-poor job she was doing. Dorset’s first selectman had never considered Des “right” for the job and never would, despite the undisputed fact that she excelled at it. She tried very hard not to seethe with resentment whenever the meddlesome snake came near her. Sometimes she almost succeeded.
Mercifully, her cell phone rang. A 911 call. She listened to the dispatcher and then barked, “Bob, I’ve got to take this.” Elbowing past him, she hurried out to her cruiser.
An intruder call had come in from the Captain Chadwick House, the eighteenth-century whaling captain’s showplace that was one of the anchors of Dorset Street’s tree-lined Historic District. It was a mammoth, brick mansion with wraparound enclosed porches and four acres of rose gardens and manicured lawns. Back in the 1920s, the Captain Chadwick House had been converted into a summer hotel. Then it was the Dorset Inn for a while. These days it housed the village’s most exclusive luxury condominiums. Six very desirable units-plus an apartment over the garages for the live-in caretaker. The Farrells lived in one of the downstairs units. A New York widow named Breslauer lived across the hall from them. The other two downstairs units belonged to wealthy couples that had multiple residences around the world and spent only a few weeks out of the year in Dorset. The owner of one of the upstairs units had recently passed away. Her children were fighting over it. The other upstairs unit belonged to Bertha Peck, the indomitable eighty-eight-year-old widow who was the Heidi Klum of Dorset polite society. Bertha Peck decided who was in and who was out. No village blue blood dared to marry, divorce or sneeze without clearing it with Bertha. Bertha was rich. Bertha was powerful. Bertha was Dorset.
It was she who’d placed the intruder call. Bertha wasn’t exactly a stranger to the 911 dispatchers. Just last Tuesday she’d dialed 911 to report that her toilet was stopped up. “Ma’am, you do realize that this number’s for emergencies, don’t you?” the dispatcher had pointed out. To which Bertha had loftily replied, “Young lady, my toilet isn’t working. Allow me to assure you, that is an emergency.”
The old girl was high maintenance. Downright dotty. But as first responder, Des had to play it by the book. As she parked her cruiser out front, her eyes scanned Dorset Street for any sign of a getaway driver idling nearby. She saw no one. Got out and rushed up the path to the front door.
The entry hall of the Captain Chadwick House was elegantly wallpapered and carpeted. A chair lift had been built into the grand staircase up to the second floor. Bertha’s, from when she’d had hip-replacement surgery last year. She didn’t need to use it anymore. Got around just fine now. Played a round of golf every afternoon at the country club with three other rich widows, who together comprised an octogenerian Heathers set.
When Des arrived at the top of the stairs she found the door to Bertha’s apartment wide open. The lock did not appear to be tampered with but Des unsnapped her holster anyway. “Mrs. Peck?” she called out, rapping on the open door with her knuckles.
“Come in, Desiree!” Bertha sang out from somewhere inside of the apartment. “We’re in here, dear!”
We?
Bertha Peck’s grand-sized living room had a twenty-foot ceiling, a chandelier, wood-burning fireplace and a balcony that looked out over the rear lawn to the Lieutenant River. Her taste in decor leaned toward Victorian plush. Sofas and armchairs that looked like great big ornate pincushions. But the artworks that crowded her walls were quite modern and exotic. Bertha was a major supporter of the Dorset Art Academy and liked to display the originals she purchased at the annual student show-including one of Des’s own horrifyingly brutal pen-and-ink drawings of a murder victim. This one a battered ten-year-old girl named Honoria Freeman. Giving artistic life to the murdered souls whom she encountered on the job was Des’s passion and her salvation.
She found Bertha seated on the sofa in her den, calmly watching a rerun of Seinfeld. The episode where Jerry decides to buy his dad a new Cadillac. Bertha Peck was a dainty little thing who’d topped out at maybe five feet two back in her prime a half century ago. Now she was more like four feet eleven, and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. Her linen summer dress was trimly cut, expensive and stylish. So was her cropped, layered hair,
