"Plum Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeMille Nelson)

CHAPTER 2

We approached the Gordon house nestled on a small lane on the west shore of the point. The house was a 1960s ranch type that had been made over into a 1990s contemporary. The Gordons, from somewhere out in the Midwest, and uncertain about their career paths, were leasing the house with an option to buy, as they once mentioned to me. I think if I worked with the stuff they worked with, I, too, wouldn't make any long-range plans. Hell, I wouldn't even buy green bananas.

I turned my attention to the scene outside the windows of the Jeep. On this pleasant, shady lane, little knots of neighbors and kids on bicycles stood around in the long purple shadows, talking, and looking at the Gordon house. Three Southold police cars were parked in front of the house, as were two unmarked cars. A county forensic van blocked the driveway. It's a good policy not to drive onto or park at a crime scene so as not to destroy evidence, and I was encouraged to see that Max's little rural police force was up to snuff so far.

Also on the street were two TV vans, one from a local Long Island news station, the other an NBC News van.

I noticed, too, a bunch of reporter-types chatting up the neighbors, whipping microphones in front of anyone who opened his mouth. It wasn't quite a media circus yet, but it would be when the rest of the news sharks got on to the Plum Island connection.

Yellow crime scene tape was wrapped from tree to tree, cordoning off the house and grounds. Max pulled up behind the forensic van and we got out. A few cameras flashed; then a bunch of big video lights went on, and we were being taped for the eleven o'clock news. I hoped the disability board wasn't watching, not to mention the perps who'd tried to ice moi, and who would now know where I was.

Standing in the driveway was a uniformed officer with a pad — the crime scene recorder — and Max gave him my name, title, and so forth, so I was officially logged in, now subject to subpoenas from the DA and potential defense attorneys. This was exactly what I didn't want, but I had been home when fate called.

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, #224; 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, nonthreatenmg, 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 hophead 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.

But then there was the red soil in the treads of their running shoes. Where did it come from? Not from the laboratory, probably not from the walkway to the Plum Island ferry dock, not their boat, and not the dock or deck here. It appeared they were somewhere else today, and they were dressed differently for the day, and for sure the day had ended differently. There was something else going on here, and I had no idea what it was, but it was definitely something else.

Yet, it was still possible that they just stumbled onto a burglary. I mean, this might have nothing to do with their jobs. The thing was, Max was nervous about that and sensitive to it, and it had infected me, too, pardon the pun. And before midnight, this place would be visited by the FBI, Defense Intelligence people, and the CIA. Unless Max could catch a hophead burglar before then.

"Excuse me."

I turned toward the voice. It was the lady in the tan suit. I said, "You re excused."

"Excuse me, are you supposed to be here?"

"I'm here with the band."

"Are you a police officer?"

Obviously my T-shirt and shorts didn't project an authority image. I replied, "I'm with Chief Maxwell."

"I could see that. Have you logged in?"

"Why don't you go check?" I turned and walked down to the next level of the deck, avoiding the little colored flags. I headed toward the dock. She followed.

"I'm Detective Penrose from Suffolk County homicide, and I'm in charge of this investigation."

"Congratulations."

"And unless you have official business here — "

"You'll have to speak to the chief." I got down to the dock and walked out to where the Gordons' boat was tied. It was very breezy out on the long dock and the sun had set. I didn't see any sailboats on the bay now, but a few powerboats went by with their running lights on. A three-quarter moon had risen in the southeast, and it sparkled across the water.

The tide was in and the thirty-foot boat was nearly at dock level. I jumped down onto the boat's deck.

"What are you doing? You can't do that."

She was very, good-looking, of course; if she'd been ugly, I'd have been much nicer. She was dressed, as I indicated, rather severely, but the body beneath the tailored clothes was a symphony of curves, a melody of flesh looking to break free. In fact, she looked like she was smuggling balloons. The second thing I noticed was that she wasn't wearing a wedding ring. Filling out the rest of the form: age, early thirties; hair, medium length, coppery color; eyes, blue-green; skin, fair, not much sun for this time of year, light makeup; pouty lips; no visible marks or scars; no earrings; no nail polish; pissed-off expression on her face.

"Are you listening to me?"

She also had a nice voice despite the present tone. I suspected that because of the pretty face, great body, and soft voice, Detective Penrose had trouble being taken seriously, and thus she overcompensated with butchy attire. She probably owned a book titled Dress to Bust Balls.

"Are you listening to me?"

"I'm listening to you. Are you listening to me? I told you to talk to the chief."

"I am in charge here. In matters of homicide, the county police — "

"Okay, we'll go see the chief together. Just a minute."

I took a quick look around the boat, but it was dark now, and I couldn't see much. I tried to find a flashlight. I said to Detective Penrose, "You should post an officer here all night."

"Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Please come out of the boat."

"Do you have a flashlight on you?"

"Out of the boat. Now."

"Okay." I stepped onto the gunwale, and to my surprise she extended her hand, which I took. Her skin was cool. She pulled me up onto the dock and at the same time, quick as a cat, her right hand went under my T-shirt and snatched the revolver from my waistband. Wow.

She stepped back, my piece in her hand. "Stand where you are."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Who are you?"

"Detective John Corey, NYPD, homicide, ma'am."

"What are you doing here?"

"Same as you."

"No, I caught this case. Not you."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Do you have any official status here?"

"Yes, ma'am. I was hired as a consultant."

"Consultant? On a murder case? I've never heard of such a thing."

"Me neither."

"Who hired you?"

"The town."

"Idiotic."

"Right." She seemed undecided about what to do next, so to be helpful I suggested, "Do you want to strip-search me?"

I thought I saw a smile pass over her lips in the moonlight. My heart was aching for her, or it might have been the hole in my lung acting up.

She asked me, "What did you say your name was?"

"John Corey."

She searched her memory. "Oh…you're the guy — "

"That's me. Lucky me."

She seemed to soften, then gave my.38 a twirl and handed it to me, butt first. She turned and walked away.

I followed her along the dock, up the three-leveled deck to the house where the outdoor lights lit up the area around the glass doors and moths circled around the globes.

Max was talking to one of the forensic people. Then he turned to me and Detective Penrose and asked us, "You two met yet?"

Detective Penrose responded, "Why is this man involved in this case?

Chief Maxwell replied, "Because I want him to be involved."

"That's not your decision, Chief."

"And neither is it yours."

They kept bouncing the ball back and forth and my neck was getting tired, so I said, "She's right, Chief. I'm out of here. Get me a ride home." I turned and walked toward the moongate, then with a little practiced dramatics, I turned back to Maxwell and Penrose and said, "By the way, did anyone take the aluminum chest in the stern of the boat?"

Max asked, "What aluminum chest?"

"The Gordons had a big aluminum chest that they used to stow odds and ends, and sometimes they used it for an ice chest to hold beer and bait."

"Where is it?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

"I'll look for it."

"Good idea." I turned and walked through the gate and went out to the front lawn away from the parked police cars. The neighbors had been joined by the morbidly curious as word of the double homicide spread through the small community.

A few cameras popped in my direction, then video lights came on, illuminating me and the front of the house. Video cameras rolled, reporters called out to me. Just like old times. I coughed into my hand in case the disability board was watching, not to mention my ex-wife.

A uniformed cop from the backyard caught up to me, and we got into a marked Southold Township PD, and off we went. He said his name was Bob Johnson, and he asked me, "What do you think, Detective?"

"They were murdered."

"Yeah, no kidding." He hesitated, then inquired, "Hey, do you think it has to do with Plum Island or not?"

"Not."

"Tell you what — I've seen burglaries, and this wasn't burglary. It was supposed to look like a burglary, but it was a search — you know? They were looking for something."

"I didn't look inside."

"Germs." He glanced at me. "Germs. Biological warfare germs. That's what I think. Right?"

I made no reply.

Johnson continued, " That's what happened to the ice chest. I heard you say that."

Again, I made no reply.

"There were vials or something in the chest. Right? I mean, Jesus Christ, there could be enough stuff out there to wipe out Long Island… New York City."

Probably the planet, Bob, depending on which kind of bug it was and how much could be grown from the original stuff.

I leaned toward Officer Johnson and held his arm to get his attention. I said, "Do not breathe one fucking word of this to anyone. Do you understand?"

He nodded.

We drove in silence back to my place.