“Ma'am?”
“He drops his drawers so often, he's forever dropping his keys as well. Two-no three-so far this week. He just pays the fee at the front desk and asks for a new one. He loses cash, too. Or so he says. In truth, I suspect he sometimes pays the young ladies for services rendered. That's why he never carries his wallet.” She cocks her head toward a bedside table. “Doesn't want his ‘dates’ taking his credit cards, too.”
Ceepak slips on a pair of evidence gloves and flips the wallet open. Flashes me the driver's license. I see Dr. Ted's DMV portrait. That'll help.
“Mrs. Winston, we noted your name in the guest book of The Howland House Whaling Museum.”
“So?”
“Were you there yesterday?”
“What can I say, Officer? I was bored out of my fucking gourd.”
“Did your husband go with you?”
She almost gags on a smoky chuckle. “Teddy?”
“Yes, ma'am. Was he with you at the museum?”
“Of course not. All he wants to do on our one vacation together all year is fish. First, he drags me on this charter boat with an imbecilic clown of a captain … “
That would be Pete.
“ … then, when I tell him how much I hate it, he drops me off at the dock and rents a dinghy for the day. Probably rented a first mate, too. In a bikini.”
Ceepak folds up the wallet, tucks it into a plastic bag.
“We need to take this with us,” he says. “We will return it as soon as possible.”
Mrs. Winston waves her cigarette around in the air. She could care less.
“What make and model of car does your husband drive?” asks Ceepak.
“Down here?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Porsche Boxster. The girls
The woman could write an antimarriage manual. It's like Springsteen says in that “Tunnel of Love” song:
“He collects their panties,” she says out of the blue. “Sometimes earrings. I found them. At home. In the basement. He has all his souvenirs lined up in a footlocker, sorted and stored in little plastic bags. He even labels them. Name. Date. Score. I believe five stars is his highest rating.”
“These labels,” says Ceepak. “Does he type them?”
“I don't recall. As you might suspect, I didn't spend all that much time admiring his collection. One fleeting glance was enough.” She grinds her cigarette out in the juice glass. I hear it sizzle when it finds liquid. She pulls a fresh smoke out of the pack.
“Do you have any idea where your husband has gone?”
“You mean now?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
She sends a jet of butane flame up to the tip of her cigarette. Sucks in to get it going. Blows out.
“Well, let's see. Your fellow police officers probably scared off his tea-cart tart downstairs. Therefore, I can only assume Teddy is once again on the prowl, hunting for fresh, young meat.”
Unexpectedly, she focuses on me. Gives me this lewd leer. Ceepak is watching her but she's zeroed in on the sidekick. So now he's watching her watch me. Meanwhile, I'm wishing I were somewhere- or someone- else.
“How about you, young man?” she says almost flirtatiously, flicking her tongue at the white stuff caked in the corner of her dry lips. “Where do you go to meet eager and willing young girls?”
I don't answer.
Suddenly, the idea of ever meeting another girl, for any reason whatsoever, is totally grossing me out.
In fact, it's downright frightening.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
We swing by the station house to drop off Dr. Winston's driver's license.
Denise Diego scans it into her computer and in ten seconds flat, Dr. Theodore A. Winston's headshot is displayed on Mobile Data Terminals inside cop cars up and down the island and over on the mainland.
“Handsome dude,” Diego says, wiping Dorito grease off her fingers and onto her pants.
“Stay away from this one, Dee,” I say. “He's trouble.”
“Roger that,” says Ceepak.
“A bad boy, hunh?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Sometimes those are the most fun.”
We leave our colleague to her dirty daydreams and head out of the computer room, into the open bullpen around the front desk.
“Ceepak? Boyle?”
It's Chief Baines, lurking in the doorway to his office.
“Sir?”
“Santucci's back on task,” he says. “I told him to concentrate on finding the girl.”
Ceepak nods. It's not what he wants to hear, but he has to live with it for the moment.
“Did the wife know where Dr. Winston went?”
“Negative,” says Ceepak.
“He's probably our doer. Why else would he run?”
“It's a possibility, sir.”
“The guilty ones always bolt.”
“So do the frightened ones, sir.”
“Yeah, well, I say he's guilty. Where do you think he's hiding out?”
“No telling. He's pretty familiar with the island. He's vacationed here a number of summers over the years.”
“He was here back in the 1980s? When those other girls were killed?”
“Yes, sir. Our intelligence suggests as much.”
I smile a little. I'm “our intelligence” because I let the jerk talk my ear off one night in a bar.
The chief doesn't know this, however. I think he thinks
“Yes, sir.” Ceepak says it without any of the gung-ho enthusiasm I suspect the chief was looking for.
Ceepak just said it so the chief would shut up and let us go do our job.
“Where now?” I ask.
“Reverend Trumble's,” says Ceepak. “I suspect Life Under the Son is where our killer first met his victims. Perhaps his face is even captured in one of those photographs hanging on the Reverend's office wall.”
“Those surf baptisms? The ones with the crowds?”
Ceepak nods. “The killer may have heard the girls confess their so-called sins and then, his head filled with the Reverend's fire and brimstone, become something of a vigilante, enforcing a rigid code of justice as outlined in the writings of Ezekiel-a code he may have first learned from the Reverend himself.”
We head over to Beach Lane and travel north to The Sonny Days Inn.
“Let's see if the good Reverend is in.”
We head toward the office. On the walk across the parking lot, my stomach growls because it's after five and I can smell Italian sausage, onions, and sweet peppers wafting on the breeze. We're that close to the
