Dead in Vineyard Sand (25 page)

“What a terrible liar you are,” said Dom. “How about for loitering, then?” His cop smile lacked warmth, I thought.

“How about letting me tag along instead? You owe it to me. If it wasn't for me you wouldn't be going up there.”

Dom pursed his lips, then said, “Oh, all right. I guess it can't hurt. But stay out of the way when we get there. Olive, where'd I put that extra vest of mine? Oh, yeah, I remember.” He went to a closet and groped around, then came up with an old vest and tossed it to me. It was heavy.

“This weighs a ton,” I said, slipping it on. “Don't you have one of those fancy new ones like you're wearing?”

“That one's fine.” Dom looked around and said, “Okay, we'll do it as we agreed. Two cars up to the Highsmith place and the other two to the Willets'. No sirens or lights. Olive, call the garage and have their truck and trailer follow us. Everybody ready? All right, let's go. And be careful. There's a murderer out there somewhere and we may be getting close to him. J.W., you ride with me.”

We went out and climbed into the cruisers and drove through Vineyard Haven and on to points west. Dom's big fingers tapped the wheel as he drove.

“Do you buy the idea that the Willets hired a gun to do their work?” he asked.

“Most people don't know any gunmen or how to find one,” I said. “The Willets might have been out of their minds with grief, but I don't think they'd have hired the first guy they asked.”

“Maybe they'd been chewing on the idea for a long time and had already made their plans. Maybe the girl's death just triggered the plan.”

“It's possible.”

“But you don't like it.”

“No. Do you?” I asked.

“No. An arranged hit is usually a straightforward murder or one that's supposed to look like an accident. The Highsmith killing was like a smart-ass stunt.”

I nodded. “You mean the sand trap business. I agree. That's been odd from the beginning. It's sophomoric.”

“There's something childish about most criminals,” said Dom. “A lot of them can't read and according to Kohlberg, a lot of them never get past a kid's level of moral development.”

I arched my brows. “Jeez, Dom. Is Kohlberg required reading in cop college these days? I didn't know you guys were so up on theories of morality.”

“There's a lot you don't know, J.W. In your day, you boys in blue weren't reading anything more complicated than Spider-Man, but times have changed.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

“I probably am,” I said.

Dom was on the radio, again advising the occupants of the other cruisers to be especially careful. I had a slight headache as I ran things back and forth through my mind. Our caravan wound its way along State Road to North Tisbury, then hooked left at the old oak and right on Panhandle Road and went on into Chilmark. The westering summer sun was in our eyes and we squinted against it.

We came to the Highsmith driveway and Dom turned onto it, followed by one of the Chilmark cruisers. The other two cruisers and the truck and trailer went on to the Willet place.

The Volvo was parked in front of the garage. We stopped and got out of the cruisers.

“Careful, now,” said Dom.

“There's an apartment over the garage,” I said.

“Larry, you and Zim go check that out,” said Dom. “If you find anybody, ask them to step outside. There should be at least three people living here. I've got the search warrants with me if anybody asks. Stay here, J.W.”

He started for the house, but before he got there the front door opened and Gregory and Belinda Highsmith came out into the bright sun. Their arms were linked. They looked like a pair of angels. His white short-sleeved shirt hung over tan shorts; she was wearing a diaphanous white dress that was lightly tied at the
waist and her long hair was down. She could have been stepping from a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

They looked at us, wide-eyed. “Officers, what are you doing here?”

Dom said, “We have a warrant to search this property. We'll appreciate your cooperation.”

“I don't understand,” said the boy in his musical baritone. “What are you looking for?”

“I want you two to stay here with Mr. Jackson,” said Dom. “Where's your uncle?”

“Oh,” said the girl, “I think he took a walk. He should be back soon.”

“Step down here, please,” said Dom. “This is the warrant. It allows us to search both the property and the people we find here. I'm going to start with you two. You first, young man. Put your hands here on the car.”

“Shouldn't we have a lawyer?” asked the girl airily.

“It's too late for a lawyer to stop this search,” said Dom. He patted Gregory down and found nothing that interested him. “You're next, miss.”

Her angel eyes had been floating around the yard, watching Larry and Zim disappear into the garage, eyeing me with a vague contempt, watching Dom search her brother.

“I don't want your hands on me,” she said to Dom in a suddenly icy voice.

He nodded. “A policewoman is at the Willet house. I'll have her come up.”

“Never mind,” she said, her voice switching smoothly to silk. She lifted her arms over her head and stepped so close to him that their bodies touched. “You do your duty, Officer. You'll probably like it a lot.”

Her arms rose higher, seemingly to circle his neck, but then suddenly she drove her nails toward his eyes.
He jerked his head back and her nails raked down his cheeks before he could catch her wrists. She screamed an oath and tried to knee him as she writhed in his arms.

As if on command, the boy leaped forward and reached for Dom's holstered pistol, but I caught his arm. He had a mad strength and pushed me away, then lunged for the pistol again.

“Get it! Get it!” screamed Belinda. “Shoot them! Shoot them!”

I yanked my pistol out of my belt and laid the barrel hard on Gregory's arm. He cried out in pain and struck out at me with his other fist. My world turned dark, but I blocked his next blow and hit him hard in the face with the pistol. He fell down and blood began to flow from his broken nose. He put his hands to his face and began to cry.

“Coward! Coward! Oh, you coward! What have you done?” Belinda's voice was a feral howl, like that of the last wolf in the world. Dom pushed her away and she fell on her knees and cradled Gregory's head in her arms. “Gregory, what have they done to you? Oh, Gregory!”

There was blood on Dom's face, but he ignored it. Zim and Larry, having heard the howl, came out of the garage, guns in hand. They came running over.

“Cuff these two and put them in the cruiser,” said Dom. “Take the boy to the hospital first, then take both of them to jail. Assaulting an officer will do for the time being. Watch yourselves every second. They're a couple of vipers.”

“You stink!” screamed the girl. “All of you stink!” Zim snapped cuffs on her and pulled her to the cruiser, but she never stopped talking. “You don't belong here! You can't prove anything! You don't have any evidence
at all! You're just stupid cops! We can hire the best lawyers in the world and they'll make you all look like fools! You
are
fools! I'm thirteen years old! Nothing will happen to us! We're just kids! You leave Gregory alone, damn you all! I'll kill you all!” She said more, but I had stopped listening.

Larry cuffed Gregory and I helped drag him to the cruiser. With Gregory and Belinda in the rear seat, he and Zim drove away.

I got the first aid kit from Dom's cruiser and cleaned up his face a little. “Better have somebody else look at this,” I said. “That girl is so poisonous that she may have toxic nails.”

“Later,” he said. “Well, I'm shorthanded and you used to be a cop, so you can help me search this place. Afterward we'll get more people over to do a more thorough job. The girl may be right, you know. We may not have evidence that will hold up in court. We need the gun.”

But we didn't find it. All we found was emptiness.

“If I was one of the kids,” I said, “I wouldn't keep the gun here. I'd keep it someplace else.” I looked out a back window of the house.

“If it's Willet's gun,” said Dom, “why not keep it at Willet's house, right where Willet left it? That way they can claim to know nothing about it, especially if they wiped it clean afterward. Let's go down and give Olive a hand.”

“First, look at this,” I said. Dom came and stood beside me. I pointed. “That's the old road that used to lead to the rock quarry up on the hill. The grass looks bent down to me, as if somebody has driven a car up there.”

“Yes, it does,” said Dom. “We'll go there first.”

We walked up the hill, following the faint imprint of
tires, until we crossed the top of the hill. There, a few yards beyond the crest, we came to the lip of the old quarry and looked down at the dark, quiet waters that filled the crater.

The tire tracks ended at the granite ledge on which we stood. I knelt and gestured at fresh scratches and a bit of blue paint on the stone.

“The Shelkrotts drove a blue Chevy station wagon,” I said. I tried to see down through the quiet water, but it was too deep for my eyes, just as it had been too deep for the young Chilmark cop when he'd tried to find the bottom as a boy.

“We'll get divers and a crane up here,” said Dom. “If we find what I think we'll find, we may not need that pistol after all.” He stood up and looked around. “Where do you think we'll find Tom Brundy? Did the kids kill him too?”

“I don't know. That's his Volvo down there at the house. Maybe you should look in the trunk.”

We went back down to the house. Dom got into the cruiser and began to make calls on his radio. Soon the place would be crawling with policemen. I was leaning against the car when Dom got out.

“I guess it's an old story,” I said, “but I hate to think that kids will murder their parents.”

“But you think this pair killed both the Willet girl and their father,” said Dom, in a surprisingly gentle voice.

“One of them or both of them, yes. I don't know if it can ever be proved, but that's what I think. I think the kids are both Mad Hatters. While they were little, maybe no one saw that they were different from normal children, but as they grew older their parents and the Shelkrotts must have noticed they were strange. Then, when they reached puberty, they got interested in each
other sexually and it became impossible to ignore. I believe that's why Henry Highsmith was so testy that day in the fish market. He was a man with two insane, incestuous children and he didn't know what to do about them. The only thing he could think of was to split the kids up by sending Belinda to school in Switzerland. It was the incest that drove the Willets away. They didn't want their daughter to associate with the crazy Highsmith children. Belinda said that it was the Highsmiths who cut off the relationship, but it was really the other way around.”

“But the Willet girl still had the hots for Gregory,” said Dom. “And when she made a play for him on the beach, they killed her. Is that it?”

“I'd lay my money on Belinda as the killer. She's nasty when any girl gets close to her brother. I see Gregory as the aider and abettor. I think it was a spur of the moment thing. They saw their chance to make it look like an accident, and they took it.”

“After making out together on the beach.”

“Yes. Maybe Heather came back and found them. Maybe that's what triggered the murder. We'll have to ask them about that.”

“And you think it was Gregory, driving the Willets' old SUV, who ran his mother off the road.”

“Yes. I think they decided that if they were going to stay together, they'd have to get rid of their parents, and that was their first try. The kids used to drive that old truck around the field behind the Willets' house. Every farm kid in the country learned to drive like that. The Willets had left the island, but the kids had a key to the house—my guess is that Gregory got it from Heather when she was trying to lure him into her arms—and got the padlock key from the closet. He knew his mother was riding her bike to Vineyard
Haven that day and he went after her and he almost got her. Afterward, she said it was her fault, but if she recognized the yellow truck, she must have had a different suspicion.

“Can you imagine what it must feel like to suspect that your child is trying to murder you?”

“You must go through a lot of denial,” said Dom. Cops see such denial pretty often when they arrest some kid. The mother can't believe it and calls the cops bad names, even if she knows the kid's guilty.

I went on: “I figure Willet left his pistol in his house and that the kids got their hands on it about that time, probably after snooping through the place. Maybe they had it before, but didn't decide to use it until after they failed with the truck. Their chance came when their father was making his daily round-trip ride down-island. One of them, or maybe both of them, met him down there somewhere and shot him. It was dusk, too dark for anybody to be playing golf, so they took the utility road into Waterwoods and buried the body in that sand trap as a final snub. I'm willing to bet that if you check the records at Waterwoods, you'll find out that one or both of them played there at one time or another.”

“A juvenile trick. Insult to injury.”

“Also a pretty stupid thing to do because they were lucky not to have been seen. But they're kids, remember, and not as smart as they think they are.”

“None of us are,” said Dom. “Then they ambushed their mother when she came out of the funeral parlor. They went out ahead of her and saw another one of those moments of opportunity and took advantage of it. If the manager had come out with her, they might not have shot.”