“It’s not the one Isabella used. She picked up the Mustang at the rental office in town, near the ferry terminal.”
“Thanks. But it’s not that. We’re clearly going to need our own car today, okay?”
“We’ll take you anywhere you need to go, Ms. Cooper. I’ve got a government car… you can ride with me.“
“Not possible, Luther,” Mike said as he steered my elbow across the grass to the rental car area.“She’s allergic to polyester. Five minutes in the car with you and she’s likely to lose it all over your best suit. Trust me, she’s hell on synthetics.”
We were fortunate to get one of the rental cars, since the annual Bluefish Derby, which attracted devotees from all over the Northeast, was in its last days and fishermen were everywhere. I pulled out of the parking lot and yelled to Wally that we would meet them all up on Daggett’s Pond Way. The airport is in the middle of the island, so we turned west and began the ride to my house, twenty minutes up-island, taking the South Road so I could point out my favorite sights along the way.
“We’ve got to get some information about Isabella and the investigation. You think Wally will give it to you?” Mike queried.
“That’s our best shot. We should be able to pick up a bit when they walk the crime scene with us. But at some point, back at the house, let’s make sure that one of us has a few moments alone with Wally. I don’t have to invite the trooper and Luther in for tea once they’re through with me as a witness. But we’ll ask Wally to stay, and you can suggest to Eb that he take you around the property and catch you up on some Mayhew history. Wally’s a softie I’m sure he’ll give us some direction, once we get Luther out of the picture.”
“Luther is he sent from central casting, or what? He’s probably dynamite on a forged check case but your mother could solve a murder faster than he could.”
“I can’t wait to tell Sarah Brenner about him. She’s working on a ”Top Ten“ list for sex crimes prosecutors, you know, like Letterman does every night? The Top Ten assumptions people make about district attorneys who handle sex crimes… Number 3 People assume that you want to hear every joke that has the words penis or vagina in it, or has remotely to do with any kind of sexual act between humans, animals, or extraterrestrials. Number 2 People assume that you are interested in any social or sexual problem that they or anyone they have ever talked to has mentioned to them… and Number 1 People always assume that you must be incapable of a “normal” social life whatever that is after listening to daily tales of deviancy and dysfunction. She’d just love Luther and his little organ.“
We were well into Chilmark now, beginning the gradual climb up the road at Abel’s Hill. Off to the right was the quiet local cemetery, scene of many stoned pilgrimages to Belushi’s grave, and then further down around the curve was Clarissa Alien’s farm, with its stunning view of the Atlantic beyond the grazing herd of black and white sheep.
At the intersection of Beetlebung Corner and the Menemsha Crossroad, I turned left.
“This is the center of Chilmark, Mike, with its town hall, library, post office, schoolhouse, and the general store run by my friends Primo and Mary.
“We’re almost there.”
I envisioned Isabella getting her coffee and supplies from Primo every day, as I had suggested, or maybe going next door to The Feast for dinner. Had Wally checked those places, to see who was with her or whether she had signaled a sense of danger to anyone? If he hadn’t, Mike and I could do it this afternoon.
“If she didn’t hang out here, she might have gone up to Gay Head. We can check that out, too.”
“What’s there?”
“Indians.”
“Dot-and-a-knot?” asked Mike.
I bit my lip, trying not to give him the satisfaction of a smile. One of the truly refreshing things about the Homicide Squad was that political correctness had never had an impact there it simply didn’t make a difference.
“Dot-and-a-knot‘ was squad jargon for East Indians the twisted headgear and the red forehead dot of the Hindu religion.
“No, stupid. Feathers. This island was inhabited by Indians Wampanoags until the English came. The history was like everyplace else in America and the Indians were pushed off their land, up to the very tip of the island. Now the tribal lands are protected and the tribe has won official recognition from the government.”
I slowed down as the road dipped at the Gosnold bridge and nodded off to the right, telling Mike to look. Beyond the town boat landing and, across the wide expanse of Menemsha Pond was my cherished hilltop. As soon as I hit this point in the drive my pulse always quickened and my spirits elevated: I was home. I hit the accelerator and raced up the winding hill toward the granite markers and row of six mailboxes which stood at the mouth of Daggett Pond Way. But as I made the last turn onto the unpaved path and saw the access interrupted by the neon yellow color of the crime-scene tape, I braked to a halt and pulled the rented car into a clearing beside a faded bush of lacy blue hydrangeas, as I wondered what Isabella Lascar’s last moments had been like.
We sat quietly in our car for five or six minutes until Wally’s cruiser and Luther’s black sedan pulled in behind us. When they motioned to us to get out, Mike and I opened our doors and joined them on the strip of tall grass next to the roadway. It was only thirty yards back to State Road, but that was entirely out of view because of the sharp bend in the old path. And although my house and the homes of my neighbors were straight ahead, they were shielded from sight by the dense growth of pines and cedars that crowded both sides of the hilltop that crested before us.
“Not a bad place for a murder,” I remarked to Mike. “This one piece of the drive is completely secluded. It never seemed sinister to me until this moment, but it obviously presented a great opportunity for a killer to go unnoticed.”
“Now, Alex,” Luther said as he approached us, ‘there’s not much left here to point out to you, but I just want you to get an idea of what we think happened.“
The neon tape stretched from one of the evergreens on the east side of the path across to the old stone wall that bordered the property on the west. It ran north on the top of the wall for about five car lengths, then squared off by wrapping around a sturdy scrub oak that stood like a sentinel at the crown of the ridge.
“We figure Miss Lascar was driving back in toward the house sometime in the late afternoon. Still have no idea where she was coming from or exactly what time it was. The rental car was a white Mustang convertible, top down when she was hit. She couldn’t have been going more than ten or fifteen miles an hour on this part of the roadway.“
He was right about that. The dirt path was so deeply rutted and uneven that most cars bottomed out on it and you had to slow down to a crawl to maneuver the craters.
“We had a field team down from Boston yesterday,” Agent Waldron droned on, ‘but they didn’t come up with very much out here.“
“Outdoor crime scenes are the worst,” Mike commiserated. “Very hard to define.”
We had worked a few together in Central Park and in Morningside Park so I knew exactly what he meant.
Without an eyewitness and with no clear boundaries like the four walls of a room in an apartment or the limited confines of a rooftop it was a tough job for cops to know how far to extend the search for clues. Close it off five feet too soon and you’re likely to overlook an essential piece of evidence, but fail to limit it reasonably at some point and you’re pulling in all kinds of extraneous crap that leads your investigators off course. “Our best guess at this point is that the killer was concealed on the far side of the stone wall. It provides a natural cover, better than a duck blind, as well as a perfect brace to steady the gun. The target drove in, moving, but nice and slow. Whoever did this was a good shot. Probably wasn’t much more than ten or twelve feet from Miss Lascar. She took two, maybe three shots to the head and neck. Not much left to help us there.“
“What kind of gun are we talking about?” Mike asked.
Waldron hesitated. I knew he wanted to be a hard-ass and not tell us anything, but his instincts seemed to be fighting that. It looked as if he actually knew he might get more feedback from a genuine Homicide detective like Mike than from Wally.
“We don’t have a coroner’s report yet. My guess is a high-powered rifle. Lots of internal destruction is what I heard from the guys at the scene. Skull was shattered.”
I winced at that description, although I had seen its image flashing in my mind’s eye thousands of times in the
