The Murder House

  “Let’s swing by your place,” he says. “Wear that lavender dress I bought you. Then you’ll be turning heads.”

  “But I won’t turn heads in this?”

  He chuckles at his faux pas. “C’mon, you know what I mean. We’re going to a five-star restaurant. You really want to look like that?”

  I hike my purse back over my shoulder and remember my cell phone, the call I missed a moment ago. I pull out my iPhone and see that the call came from “Uncle Langdon,” which I really should change to “Chief James” now.

  Taking another look at my phone, I see that the chief actually called me twice, once a minute ago and once twenty-four minutes ago.

  Still standing outside the car, I dial him back.

  “Jenna Rose,” he answers, the only person who’s ever incorporated my middle name when addressing me. The only one who’s lived to tell about it, anyway. “I was about to give up on you.”

  “How can I help you, Chief? Were you looking for my recipe for grilled asparagus? It’s not that hard. Just grill the asparagus.”

  “No, missy, not just now. You wanted to work a homicide, right?”

  I spring to attention. “Yes, sir. Absolutely.”

  “Then get your butt in gear, Detective,” he says. “You just got a homicide. One you may never forget.”

  10

  “IT’S MY job. It’s not like I have a choice,” I say to Matty, his knuckles white on the leather steering wheel of his Beemer as we drive along the back roads. “A woman was murdered.”

  “It can’t wait until after dinner? She’ll still be dead.”

  I close my eyes. “You didn’t really just say that, did you?”

  The back roads are narrow and winding and unforgiving, two lanes at best, with no shoulders. Driving them in the dark is even worse. But without the back roads, the locals in Bridgehampton would collectively commit suicide during the tourist season, when the principal artery—Main Street or, if you prefer, Montauk Highway—is clogged like a golf ball in a lower intestine.

  “I passed up Yankees tickets on the third-base line,” he says. “Sabathia against Beckett in game one.”

  I know. I watched it in the bar. Sabathia got tagged for six earned runs in five innings. “It’s my job,” I say again. “What am I sup—”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not—”

  “Not tonight it’s not!”

  We find our destination, lit up by the STPD like a nighttime construction job, spotlights shining on the scene deep within the woods. The road has been reduced to one lane by traffic cones and flares.

  Matty pulls up, puts it in park, and shifts in his seat to face me. “Don’t act like you have no choice. There are detectives on duty right now. You’re not one of them. You didn’t have to take this assignment. You wanted it.”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Sorry about your Yankees tickets.”

  “Jenna, c’mon.”

  I step out of the Beemer and flash my badge to the uniform minding the perimeter. I dip under the crime-scene tape and watch my step as I walk through the woods, with their uneven footing and stray branches.

  It’s a large lot, undeveloped land full of tall trees, with a FOR SALE sign near the road. Whoever did this picked a remote location.

  Isaac Marks approaches me. “Bru-tal,” he says. “C’mon.” I follow him through the brush, my feet crunching leaves and twigs. “The guy who owns this lot found her,” he says. “Nice old guy, late seventies. He was stopping by for some routine maintenance and heard a swarm of insects buzzing around.”

  I slow my approach when I see her. It’s hard to miss her, under the garish lighting. She looks artificial, like a museum exhibit—Woman in Repose, except in this case, it would be more like Woman with a tree stump through her midsection.

  “Jesus,” I mumble.

  The woman is naked, arms and legs splayed out, her head fallen back, as she lies suspended several feet off the ground, impaled on the trunk of a tree that has been shaved down to the point of a thick spear.

  Technicians are working her over right now, photographing and gently probing her. The insects buzzing around her are fierce. She’s suffered some animal bites, too. That, plus the look of her skin, gives me an approximate window on time of death.

  “She died…maybe one, two days ago,” I say.

  Isaac looks at me. “Very good, Detective. At least that’s what the ME is saying at first glance. One to two days.”

  “That’s a significant difference, one versus two days.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “Two days ago,” I say, “Noah Walker was a free man. But one day ago, we took him into custody, and he couldn’t have done this.”

  “You’re connecting this with Noah Walker?” Isaac gives me a crosswise glance. “This is nothing like those murders.”

  I move in for a closer look at the victim. This nameless woman, hardened and discolored now, with the ravages of nature having taken their toll, is hard to categorize. I’m thinking she’s pretty young, from the bone structure and lithe build. Early twenties, maybe, what appear to be nice features, and beautiful brown hair hanging down inches from the grass.

  She was pretty. Before some monster impaled her on a wooden spear like a sacrificial offering to the gods, this woman was pretty.

  “No ID yet,” says Isaac. “But we have a missing-persons from Sag Harbor that we think will check out. If it does, then this is…” He flips open a notepad and holds it in the artificial light. “Bonnie Stamos. Age twenty-four. Couple of arrests for take-a-wild-guess.”

  “She was a working girl.” Not terribly surprising. The clients a prostitute serves come in all shapes and sizes, but it’s like I felt when I was on patrol, approaching a car I’d just pulled over—you’re never really sure what’s waiting for you.

  “This is totally different than what we found on Ocean Drive,” Isaac says. “Those were a bloodbath. This thing is…what…posed, I guess. Dramatic. Like some ritual thing, some ancient Mayan ceremony. How do you connect these two crimes?”

  I squat down next to the tree stump and gesture at it. “See the side of the tree and the surrounding grass and dirt?”

  “I see blood everywhere, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Exactly,” I say. “Blood everywhere. Her heart was still pumping. That’s how I connect these crimes.”

  “Not following.”

  “She was still alive when he did this, when he impaled her on the tree trunk.” I stand back up and feel a wave of nausea. “The symbolism was incidental, a means to an end,” I say. “He wanted her to die a slow death, Isaac. He wanted her to suffer.”

  11

  THE CHIEF has the porch light on for me when I walk up the steps to his house. The squad car that drove me here idles in the driveway. The door is open, and Uncle Lang has a bottle of gin and two glasses on the kitchen table. Dirty dishes are piled high in the sink just as they were earlier today, with evidence of meal choices—remnants of dried catsup or smears of brown gravy, a bit of hamburger. The floor could use a good wash, too. The clock on the wall says it’s almost two in the morning.

  My uncle doesn’t look well. He’s gained a lot of weight since Aunt Chloe left him two years ago. His face is splotchy, broken capillaries on his prominent nose, his eyes rimmed with heavy bags. He’s wearing a wife-beater T-shirt that accentuates his added poundage, tufts of curly white chest hair peeking over the top.

  “You don’t look good,” he says to me.

  I kiss him on the forehead before I turn to the refrigerator. “I was just thinking the same about you. Still drinking, I see.” I take another glance into his refrigerator. The fruit container still hasn’t been touched, but a second square is missing from the pan of spinach lasagna.

  I look back at him with an eyebrow raised.

  “See?” he says. “I listen to you.”

  “Yeah?” I take a seat across from him. “And if I look through your trash, wil
l I find an entire square piece of lasagna, without a bite taken?”

  “Now you’ve insulted me. I’m insulted.”

  That’s not a denial. But I can’t spend every waking moment hectoring him.

  “I’m serious, though,” Uncle Lang says. “You look worn out. Are you still having nightmares?”

  I shrug. It’s been a thing, since I returned to Bridgehampton. Usually they come at night, the sensation of choking, the terror, the desperate cries. What happened to me today, at 7 Ocean Drive, was the first time it ever happened during daylight.

  Lang pours me an inch of gin and slides the glass across the table. “Maybe you never should have come back here.”

  The thought has crossed my mind. It leads to another thought. “Why did my family stop coming here when I was a kid?” I ask.

  The chief shrugs. “A story for another time.”

  “So there’s a story. Something happened?”

  Lang casts a fleeting glance at me, then deflects. “Did you move the body tonight?”

  I nod. “We had to cut the tree from underneath her. Didn’t want to separate her from the trunk yet. Never know what forensics might pick up.”

  “Good. Good that you moved her. I don’t need to see photos in the Patch tomorrow. This is a dead hooker, Detective. Not a dead hooker who was split in half on a tree stump like some human shish kebab. Understand me? A dead hooker, to the media. That’s it. Just another hooker adiosed in the Hamptons. That’s a one-day story.”

  A one-day story. Appearances. Politics. There’s an election coming up, and the town supervisor is already feeling heat from the Zach Stern / Melanie Phillips murders. Another sensational murder would just add pressure. It’s good police procedure, too, not mentioning gory details to the press. In Manhattan, that plan never worked; the NYPD leaked like a colander. But here, it might.

  “Your case has nothing to do with Noah Walker,” Lang says.

  Oh, Isaac, you little shit. Talk about leaks. No wonder the chief wanted to meet me tonight. Isaac must have sneaked away from me in a free moment and called him. So now I know where his loyalties lie. That little twerp.

  “Too early to tell,” I say.

  The chief casts his eyes in my direction. He takes a sip of Beefeater and lets out a breath. “A few hours ago, you thought Noah was an innocent man, wrongly accused. Now you like him for the carnage in the woods, too.”

  “I don’t like him or dislike him. Not yet. But it’s possible the prostitute was killed while Noah was still a free man, not yet in custody. I’m just playing all the angles. That’s what I’m paid to do.”

  He makes a noise as he finishes another sip. “No, you’re paid to do what I tell you to do.”

  “I’m a detective,” I say. “Once in a while, I try to detect.”

  The gin is sharp on my tongue, hot down my throat, leaving a delicious citrus aftertaste. Tastes better than it should. I take the bottle and pour myself another. “Let me ask you a question, Chief.”

  He shows me a wary look but doesn’t speak.

  “Why did we go in so hard on the arrest?”

  “What do you mean?” He pours himself another drink.

  “When we arrested Walker. The SWAT team. The automatic weapons. We were braced for a firefight. Noah didn’t have any weapons.”

  The chief’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t make eye contact with me. “Missy, you’re lucky you’re my favorite niece.”

  “I’m your only niece.”

  “Don’t fuck with my case, Jenna.” He slams down his glass. “I’ve got Noah Walker dead to rights. I need that solved. I’ve got orders from on high. You start tying this dead-hooker murder in with it, then we have to turn your report over to Walker’s lawyer, and he’ll play with that window of time—maybe two days, maybe three, maybe Noah was already in custody when the hooker got hers—and suddenly Clarence Darrow is saying that one person did both murders, and that one person couldn’t have been Noah Walker.”

  “And what if that’s true?”

  My uncle gives me a look that I remember seeing as a child, that look an adult gives when a kid is being adorably precocious, a combination of pride and annoyance. But in this case, the annoyance is outweighing the pride.

  “Stay away from Noah Walker. Don’t make your case something it’s not.”

  “Just ‘another hooker adiosed in the Hamptons,’ right?” I push myself out of the chair. “I’m not going to do it. I’m following the leads wherever they go. You don’t like it, relieve me.”

  The chief looks exhausted. He gestures toward me, the sign of the cross, absolution from a priest. “You are hereby relieved of any responsibility for the dead hooker in the woods.”

  “That’s bullshit, Lang!” With the back of my hand, I whack my glass off the table, smashing it against the sink.

  “Yeah? You wanna go for a suspension, too?”

  “Sure!”

  “Great! You’re suspended without pay for a week.”

  “Only a week?” I yell, lost in my rage now, spinning out of control.

  “Fine, then, a month! How about dismissal? You want me to can you?” The chief rises from his chair, directing a finger at me. “And before you answer that, missy, remember that being a cop is all you know. And I gave you a second chance. You’d think that would buy me just a little bit of loyalty from you, but oh, no!”

  I shake my head, fuming. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  He waves me away with a hand. “One-month suspension, Detective, effective immediately. Now get out of my house.”

  12

  FOR THE first time in over a week, he breathes fresh air, he walks in grass, he wears his own clothes, he sees the sun, not over a concrete wall for one hour a day but out in the open. Noah Walker takes a moment to savor it before he steps into the minibus that will transport him to the train station for passage from Riverhead to Bridgehampton.

  When he’s home, he first takes a shower—no fancy showerhead or immaculate tub, but at least a healthy flow of water, without mold on the fixtures, without raw sewage bubbling from the drain, without having to look over his shoulder to wonder whether he was going to have an unexpected visitor. The biggest problem with Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead was the temporary nature of it all. Nobody in Riverhead had been convicted of a crime—if they had, they’d be in prison. Riverhead was just a pretrial holding facility for people with unaffordable bail or no bail at all, and thus there was nothing in the way of remedial programs or education, no recreational facilities, no pretense of nutritious meals. It was just walls, a handful of books, a chaplain on Sunday, shit for food, and an overpopulation of pissed-off detainees. He met someone inside, a guy named Rufus, who’d been in county lockup for over four years waiting for his trial.

  None of that for Noah. He’s demanded a speedy trial, his constitutional right. He can’t stomach the thought of waiting months, even years, wondering.

  Out of the shower, hair dripping wet, feeling warm and refreshed, he picks up his cell phone and hits the speed dial.

  “Are you out?” Paige says breathlessly when she answers.

  “I’m out,” he says, thanks to her, and the checking account that bears only her name, that her husband doesn’t control. “I’m home now.”

  “I can…I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  He feels a rush, a longing for her, tempered with fear. “Are you sure? What about—”

  “I don’t care. I’ll figure something out. I’ll tell him something. I don’t think he knows about us. He’s never said a word—”

  “He knows about us,” Noah says. Of course her husband knows. That has to be what’s going on here. John Sulzman is a man of boundless influence. Influential enough to snap his fingers and have someone thrown in prison? Noah’s no expert on backroom deals, but he doesn’t doubt it.

  “Well, I’m coming. I can’t wait to see you!”

  “Me too.” Noah closes his eyes. “Just…be careful,” he says.

&
nbsp; 13

  NOAH’S TOES curl into the moist sand. He looks out over the Atlantic, black and restless in the dark, the post-rain breeze brushing his face. This is what freedom feels like, he thinks. This is what I missed the most.

  He hears the familiar hum of the superior engine approaching. He stands and sees her Aston Martin pulling up in the lot. She pops out of the car and forgets to close the door. Noah is already running toward her.

  No, he thinks, she is what I missed the most.

  “I can’t believe it,” she manages as he scoops her up in his arms; she wraps her legs around him and grips his hair. Their mouths press against each other, more of a smash than a kiss. His body is charged with electricity.

  “I didn’t…kill those people,” he whispers.

  “You don’t need to say that to me. Of course I know that.” Paige strokes his face. “What can I do to help? Do you need money for a lawyer? A private detective?”

  “You can’t do that,” Noah says. “John will—”

  “I don’t care about John. You need someone on your side. I’ll do whatever I have to do. I won’t let you go through this alone. Tell me what you need.”

  “I just need you. That’s all I need right now.” Noah draws her close, breathes in her fresh-strawberry scent, takes in the warmth of her body. As long as he holds her, which could be five seconds, could be an hour, there is no criminal indictment, there is no prospect of life in prison, there is only Paige, the woman he loves, the woman who loves him.

  And then he hears another vehicle approaching.

  Noah raises his head. The beach had been empty, thanks in part to the lateness of the hour but more so to the rainfall an hour ago. The approaching SUV is not familiar to him. It stops in the middle of the small parking lot that serves as the end of Ocean Drive, positioned so that its headlights are trained on Noah and Paige.