His white cotton shirt was stretched taut over bulging chest muscles, and his arms were all biceps and triceps and his belly was perfectly flat, unlike the beer belly Chief Alec had going for himself. If I’d had to venture a guess, I’d have pegged the guy in his early thirties, and never had the words ‘ruggedly handsome’ been a better description for any human male. Odelia was definitely in trouble, if my limited experience was anything to go on.
I hunkered down and pricked up my ears, hoping to find confirmation that this guy was, indeed, Chase Kingsley, and not simply a tourist filing a complaint about a stolen wallet, or a traveling salesman badgering the chief.
“So what do we know so far?” the guy was saying.
“I just called the ME’s office,” said Chief Alec, “and they told me they’re expecting the results from the autopsy sometime this morning.”
The chief, a mainstay in this town for over thirty years, was the embodiment of law and order. He was also a very large man, easily twice as big as the man seated across from him. Everyone knew him as a kind-hearted, fair-minded police officer, never one to throw his weight around. He liked to settle disputes with a smile and a kindly word, ever the courteous diplomat.
And then it dawned on me. Autopsy? Had someone died? I turned my antennae-like ears toward the window, my eyes narrowed in concentration.
“Good thing Adele Pun found the body. The poor guy might never have been found otherwise,” said the one I assumed was Chase Kingsley.
“You’re right about that, Chase,” grunted the chief.
Bingo! I stared at Brutus’s owner, and couldn’t resist uttering a growl.
“That body was never meant to be found, and if the Pun woman hadn’t gone snooping around, the killer would have pulled off the perfect crime.”
I blinked. Killer? Crime? Oh. My. God. They were talking murder!
“So how did Adele Pun discover the body?” asked Chase.
The chief barked a curt, humorless laugh.“Well, that’s a writer for you, Chase. They will go sticking their noses where they don’t belong.”
At this, the chief directed a long, lingering look at me, and I froze. Not that I minded too much. Chief Alec was Odelia’s uncle on her mother’s side, after all, and I was pretty sure he was aware of his sister and niece’s secret.
He looked away again, and continued his story.“She says she was taking a dump a couple of days ago and suddenly started wondering where the product of her bowel movements went. Curious, she went and got herself a flashlight, to examine the bottom of the well, and shone it down into the abyss where generations of Hampton Covians have done their thing.”
“You should have been a poet, Chief,” remarked Chase dryly.
“Thank you. Imagine her surprise when she discovered a laptop sticking out of the tranquil surface of the brown pool below. Being a writer, holed up at a writer’s lodge, she naturally wondered what that laptop was doing there.”
Chase made a disgusted face.“Don’t tell me. She retrieved the laptop?”
The chief grinned.“She most certainly did. Though I have no idea how she did it. I imagine she used a shovel or a rake or something. Then she put the garden hose on it and dumped it into a bucket of salt for three days.”
“And what? It booted up?”
“It sure did. Just goes to show those cheap Korean laptops are a lot sturdier than you’d give them credit for. Reminds me never to spend two thousand bucks on a computer ever again.”
“And that’s how she discovered it was Paulo Frey’s laptop.”
“Yes, sir. None other than the elusive Mr. Frey.”
“The missing writer.”
“The missing writer,” the chief agreed.
I almost fell off the sill at this point. Paulo Frey was a famous novelist who’d gone missing some time last year. He’d been in the habit of renting the Writer’s Lodge once a year, a fixed-up old cabin in the woods on the edge of Hampton Cove. It was popular with writers, as there were no distractions out there, and they could work on their masterpieces undisturbed. There was even an old-fashioned outhouse, which for some reason seemed to appeal to the writing classes. Many a writer confessed they got their best ideas while seated on the john and allowing nature to run its course. Weird but true.
Paulo Frey had been one of those writers who felt they could only write a decent novel while ensconced at the Writer’s Lodge, pecking away at his laptop. Until he’d mysteriously vanished. The owner of the lodge—Hetta Fried—a patron of the arts—had assumed he’d simply skipped town, but when he hadn’t shown up in New York, his relatives had sounded the alarm.
The cabin had been thoroughly searched, but Paulo hadn’t left a trace, so no foul play was assumed. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t pulled a stunt like this before. Once he’d upped and left and had shown up six months later in Zimbabwe, living quietly in a hut in the jungle, trying to cure a severe case of writer’s block. He was one of those eccentric writers, the ones they make movies about with Johnny Depp in the lead.
“So Adele notified the police,” said Chase.
“She notified me,” the chief acknowledged. “At which point we decided to take a closer look at that outhouse.”
Chase shook his head.“That must be the last outhouse on Long Island.”
“It may very well be,” the chief agreed. “It’s garnered a lot of praise from writers. Supposed to give them ideas. Kinda like a wishing well. You drop in a nickel and you get to make a wish. Only here you drop in something else.”
“So when did you get the idea to dredge the well?”
“Well, at first we figured Frey had simply hurled his laptop into the pit in a fit of rage or something. Which would fit with the writer’s block theory.” The chief shifted his bulk, making his chair creak dangerously. “But after poking around in there for a bit, something else came bobbing up.” He fixed Chase with a knowing glance. “An arm.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah. So we called in a cesspool pumping service and found—”
“Paulo Frey.”
“Along with all of his stuff, stuffed into three Louis Vuitton suitcases. All packed and ready to go… nowhere. Looks like whoever killed him wanted to make it look like he skipped town, while he was stuffed down there all along.”
“I wouldn’t like to be the ME on this one,” said Chase, wrinkling his nose.
“You said it,” said the chief, shaking his head. “This is one messy business.”
“When will you know more?”
The chief checked the clock over the door. It was one of those clocks that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a classroom. “Shouldn’t be long now. We don’t get a lot of homicides here, so they’ve given this their highest priority. I’m expecting a call before lunch.” He patted the desk. “So what about it, Chase? Are you ready to work your first Hampton Cove homicide case?”
Chase grinned.“Throwing me in at the deep end, huh, Chief?”
“Best way to learn, buddy.”
“What better way indeed?”
At this point in the conversation, I hopped down from the windowsill and landed gracefully on all fours on the flagged floor. I’d heard enough. A genuine homicide! In Hampton Cove! This was a scoop that needed to be on the front page of the next edition of theHampton Cove Gazette. Pronto! And who better to break the story to our loyal readership than star reporter Odelia Poole herself? This would cement her reputation as the town’s best-informed reporter. Wait till I told her about this. She’d be over the moon.