Plum Island (3 page)

We walked up the gravel driveway and passed through a moongate into the backyard, which was mostly cedar deck, multileveled
as it cascaded from the house down to the bay and ended at the long dock where the Gordons’ boat was tied. It was really a
beautiful evening, and I wished Tom and Judy were alive to see it.

I observed the usual contingent of forensic lab people, plus three uniformed Southold town cops and a woman overdressed in
a light tan suit jacket and matching skirt, white blouse, and sensible shoes. At first I thought she might be family, called
in to ID the bodies and so forth, but then I saw she was holding a notebook and pen and looking official.

Lying on the nice silver-gray cedar deck, side by side on their backs, were Tom and Judy, their feet toward the house and
their heads toward the bay, arms and legs askew as though they were making snow angels. A police photographer was taking pictures
of the bodies, and the flash lit up the deck and did a weird thing to the corpses, making them look sort of ghoulish for a
microsecond, à la
Night of the Living Dead
.

I stared at the bodies. Tom and Judy Gordon were in their mid-thirties, very good shape, and even in death a uniquely handsome
couple—so much so that they were sometimes mistaken for celebrities when they dined out in the more fashionable spots.

They both wore blue jeans, running shoes, and polo shirts. Tom’s shirt was black with some marine supply logo on the front,
and Judy’s was a more chic hunter green with a little yellow sailboat on the left breast.

Max, I suspected, didn’t see many murdered people in the course of a year, but he probably saw enough natural deaths, suicides,
car wrecks, and such so that he wasn’t going to go green. He looked grim, concerned, pensive, and professional, but kept glancing
at the bodies as if he couldn’t believe there were murdered people lying right there on the nice deck.

Yours truly, on the other hand, working as I do in a city that counts about 1,500 murders a year, am no stranger to death,
as they say. I don’t see all 1,500 corpses, but I see enough so that I’m no longer surprised, sickened, shocked, or saddened.
Yet, when it’s someone you knew and liked, it makes a difference.

I walked across the deck and stopped near Tom Gordon. Tom had a bullet hole at the bridge of his nose. Judy had a hole in
the side of her left temple.

Assuming there was only one shooter, then Tom, being a strapping guy, had probably gotten it first, a single shot to the head;
then Judy, turning in disbelief toward her husband, had taken the second bullet in the side of her temple. The two bullets
had probably gone through their skulls and dropped into the bay. Bad luck for ballistics.

I’ve never been to a homicide scene that didn’t have a smell—unbelievably foul, if the victims had been dead awhile. If there
was blood, I could always smell it, and if a body cavity had been penetrated, there was usually a peculiar smell of innards.
This is something I’d like not to smell again; the last time I smelled blood, it was my own. Anyway, the fact that this was
an outdoor killing helped.

I looked around and couldn’t see any place close by where the shooter could hide. The sliding glass door of the house was
open and maybe the shooter had been in there, but that was twenty feet from the bodies, and not many people can get a good
head shot from that distance with a pistol. I was living proof of that. At twenty feet you go for a body shot first, then
get in close and finish up with a head shot. So there were two possibilities: the shooter was using a rifle, not a pistol,
or, the shooter was able to walk right up to them without causing them any alarm. Someone normal-looking, nonthreatening,
maybe even someone they knew. The Gordons had gotten out of their boat, walked up the deck, they saw this person at some point
and kept walking toward him or her. The person raised a pistol from no more than five feet away and drilled both of them.

I looked beyond the bodies and saw little colored pin flags stuck in the cedar planking here and there. “Red is for blood?”

Max nodded. “White is skull, gray is—”

“Got it.” Glad I wore the flip-flops.

Max informed me, “The exit wounds are big, like the whole back of their skulls are gone. And, as you can see, the entry wounds
are big. I’m guessing a .45 caliber. We haven’t found the two bullets yet. They probably went into the bay.”

I didn’t reply.

Max motioned toward the sliding glass doors. He informed me, “The sliding door was forced and the house is ransacked. No big
items missing—TV, computer, CD player, and all that stuff is there. But there may be jewelry and small stuff missing.”

I contemplated this a moment. The Gordons, like most egghead types on a government salary, didn’t own much jewelry, art, or
anything like that. A druggie would grab the pricey electronics and such, and beat feet.

Max said, “Here’s what I think—a burglar or burglars were doing their thing, he, she, or they see the Gordons approaching
through the glass door; he, she, or they step out onto the deck, fire, and flee.” He looked at me. “Right?”

“If you say so.”

“I say so.”

“Got it.” Sounded better than Home of Top Secret Germ Warfare Scientists Ransacked and Scientists Found Murdered.

Max moved closer to me and said softly, “What do you think, John?”

“Was that a hundred an hour?”

“Come on, guy, don’t jerk me around. We got maybe a world-class double murder on our hands.”

I replied, “But you just said it could be a simple homeowner-comes-on-the-scene-and-gets-iced kind of thing.”

“Yeah, but it turns out that the homeowners are … whatever they are.” He looked at me and said, “Reconstruct.”

“Okay. You understand that the perp did not fire from that sliding glass door. He was standing right in front of them. The
door you found open was closed then so that the Gordons saw nothing unusual as they approached the house. The gunman was possibly
sitting here in one of these chairs, and he may have arrived by boat since he wasn’t going to park his car out front where
the world could see it. Or maybe he was dropped off. In either case, the Gordons either knew him or were not unduly troubled
by his presence on their back deck, and maybe it’s a woman, nice and sweet-looking, and the Gordons walk toward her and she
toward them. They may have exchanged a word or two, but very soon after, the murderer produced a pistol and blew them away.”

Chief Maxwell nodded.

“If the perp was looking for anything inside, it wasn’t jewelry or cash, it was papers. You know—bug stuff. He didn’t kill
the Gordons because they stumbled onto him; he killed them because he wanted them dead. He was
waiting
for them. You know all this.”

He nodded.

I said, “Then again, Max, I’ve seen a lot of bungled and screwed-up burglaries where the homeowner got killed, and the burglar
got nothing. When it’s a druggie thing, nothing makes sense.”

Chief Maxwell rubbed his chin as he contemplated a hop-head with a gun on one hand, a cool assassin on the other, and whatever
might fall in between.

While he did that, I knelt beside the bodies, closest to Judy. Her eyes were open, really wide open, and she looked surprised.
Tom’s eyes were open, too, but he looked more peaceful than his wife. The flies had found the blood around the wounds, and
I was tempted to shoo them away, but it didn’t matter.

I examined the bodies more closely without touching anything that would get the forensic types all bent up. I looked at hair,
nails, skin, clothing, shoes, and so on. When I was done, I patted Judy’s cheek and stood.

Maxwell asked me, “How long did you know them?”

“Since about June.”

“Have you been to this house before?”

“Yes. You get to ask me one more question.”

“Well … I have to ask…. Where were you about 5:30
P.M.
?”

“With your girlfriend.”

He smiled, but he was not amused.

I asked Max, “How well did
you
know them?”

He hesitated a moment, then replied, “Just socially. My girlfriend drags me to wine tastings and crap like that.”

“Does she? And how did you know I knew them?”

“They mentioned they met a New York cop who was convalescing. I said I knew you.”

“Small world,” I said.

He didn’t reply.

I looked around the backyard. To the east was the house, and to the south was a thick line of tall hedges, and beyond the
hedges was the home of Edgar Murphy, the neighbor who found the bodies. To the north was an open marsh area that stretched
a few hundred yards to the next house, which was barely visible. To the west, the deck dropped in three levels toward the
bay where the dock ran out about a hundred feet to the deeper water. At the end of the dock was the Gordons’ boat, a sleek
white fiberglass speedboat—a Formula three-something, about thirty feet long. It was named the
Spirochete
, which as we know from Bio 101 is the nasty bug that causes syphilis. The Gordons had a sense of humor.

Max said, “Edgar Murphy stated that the Gordons sometimes used their own boat to commute to Plum Island. They took the government
ferry when the weather was bad and in the winter.”

I nodded. I knew that.

He continued, “I’m going to call Plum Island and see if I can find out what time they left. The sea is calm, the tide is coming
in, and the wind is from the east, so they could make maximum time between Plum and here.”

“I’m not a sailor.”

“Well, I am. It could have taken them as little as one hour to get here from Plum, but usually it’s an hour and a half, two
at the outside. The Murphys heard the Gordon boat come in about 5:30, so now we see if we can find out the time they left
Plum, then we know with a little more certainty that it
was
the Gordon boat that the Murphys heard at 5:30.”

“Right.” I looked around the deck. There was the usual patio and deck furniture—table, chairs, outdoor bar, sun umbrellas,
and such. Small bushes and plants grew through cutouts in the deck, but basically there was no place a person could conceal
him- or herself and ambush two people out in the open.

“What are you thinking about?” Max asked.

“Well, I’m thinking about the great American deck. Big, maintenance-free wood, multileveled, landscaped, and all that. Not
like my old-fashioned narrow porch that always needs painting. If I bought my uncle’s house, I could build a deck down to
the bay like this one. But then I wouldn’t have as much lawn.”

Max let a few seconds pass, then asked, “
That’s
what you’re thinking about?”

“Yeah. What are
you
thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about a double murder.”

“Good. Tell me what else you’ve learned here.”

“Okay. I felt the engines—” He jerked his thumb toward the boat. “They were still warm when I arrived, like the bodies.”

I nodded. The sun was starting to dip into the bay, and it was getting noticeably darker and cooler, and I was getting chilly
in my T-shirt and shorts, sans underwear.

September is a truly golden month up and down the Atlantic coast, from the Outer Banks to Newfoundland. The days are mild,
the nights pleasant for sleeping; it is summer without the heat and humidity, autumn without the cold rains. The summer birds
haven’t left yet, and the first migratory birds from up north are taking a break on their way south. I suppose if I left Manhattan
and wound up here, I’d get into this nature thing, boating, fishing, and all that.

Max was saying, “And something else—the line is clove-hitched around the piling.”

“Well, there’s a major break in the case. What the hell’s a line?”

“The
rope.
The boat’s rope isn’t tied to the cleats on the dock. The rope is just temporarily hitched to the pilings— the big poles
that come out of the water. I deduce that they intended to go out in the boat again, soon.”

“Good observation.”

“Right. So, any ideas?”

“Nope.”

“Any observations of your own?”

“I think you beat me to them, Chief.”

“Theories, thoughts, hunches? Anything?”

“Nope.”

Chief Maxwell seemed to want to say something else, like, “You’re fired,” but instead he said, “I’ve got to make a phone call.”
He went off into the house.

I glanced back at the bodies. The woman with the light tan suit was now outlining Judy in chalk. It’s SOP in New York City
that the investigating officer do the outline, and I guessed that it was the same out here. The idea is that the detective
who is going to follow the case to its conclusion and who is going to work with the DA should know and work the entire case
to the extent possible. I concluded, therefore, that the lady in tan was a homicide detective and that she was the officer
assigned to investigate this case. I further concluded that I’d wind up dealing with her if I decided to help Max with this.

The scene of a homicide is one of the most interesting places in the world if you know what you’re looking for and looking
at. Consider people like Tom and Judy who look at little bugs under a microscope, and they can tell you the names of the bugs,
what the bugs are up to at the moment, what the bugs are capable of doing to the person who’s watching them, and so forth.
But if I looked at the bugs, all I’d see is little squigglies. I don’t have a trained eye or a trained mind for bugs.

Yet, when I look at a dead body and at the scene around the body, I see things that most people don’t see. Max touched the
engines and the bodies and noticed they were warm, he noticed how the boat was tied, and he registered a dozen other small
details that the average citizen wouldn’t notice. But Max isn’t really a detective, and he was operating on about level two,
whereas to solve a murder like this one, you needed to operate on a much higher plane. He knew that, which is why he called
on me.

I happened to know the victims, and for the homicide detective on the case, this is a big plus. I knew, for instance, that
the Gordons usually wore shorts, T-shirts, and docksiders in the boat on their way to Plum Island, and at work they slipped
on their lab duds or their biohazard gear or whatever. Also, Tom didn’t look like Tom in a black shirt, and Judy was more
of a pastel person as I recall. My guess was that they were dressed for camouflage, and the running shoes were for speed.
Then again, maybe I was making up clues. You have to be careful not to do that.