Darleen took a long drink of her soda, considering this. “What makes you think I care?”
“You had his baby, didn’t you?” Des asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” She reached for a cigarette and lit it.
Des stared at her intently. At the way her soft, childlike hands shook. And her knee jiggled. She was talking plenty hard and tough, but was clearly frightened. She had a baby to take care of. She had no job, no education, and no skills-other than the obvious one. Tuck was her meal ticket, her comfort zone, her home. And now she could see that disappearing right before her eyes.
“Look, I don’t know where he is, okay?” Darleen said finally. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
“He didn’t come home last night?” Bliss asked.
Darleen shrugged.
“Does he stay out on you regularly?” Des pressed her.
The girl shrugged again, although this time her nostrils flared slightly. Evidently, Tuck Weems was not a one-teenager man.
“Where’s he been working lately?” Bliss asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Big Sister?”
“I guess.”
“Lock ’n Load still his regular hangout?”
Darleen didn’t answer. She’d gone mute.
Des and Bliss exchanged eye contact. They were not going to get anything more out of this girl.
“Thank you for your help, Darleen,” said Des, who felt it was her duty to add, “Girl, exposing your baby to secondhand smoke is a serious health risk. It can lead to ear infections, respiratory disease, even heart disease. You do know that, don’t you?”
“I am a really good mother, ma’am,” Darleen snarled in response. “Why don’t you take care of your own business, hunh?! Why don’t you leave?!”
They did just that. Went out the door and down the steps toward their cars.
That was when Des got the call. It came from Soave, who got it by way of the Westbrook Barracks.
The rain-soaked body of a fully clothed adult white male had just been found behind the dunes on a remote stretch of Dorset town beach called Rocky Neck. He had been shot twice. He had been dead at least twelve hours. And he had been positively identified as Tuck Weems.
CHAPTER 7
MITCH’S IDYLLIC ISLAND PARADISE was different now.
It was no longer secluded. It was no longer peaceful. There was no way it could be. Two local men had been shot dead. The New York Post was now calling Dorset “the murder capital of Connecticut’s Gold Coast.” Inside Edition, the syndicated tabloid news show, had delivered up Big Sister to the entire nation on a platter: “The blue blood is flowing,” declared their breathless correspondent. Dateline, not to be outdone, had unearthed the sordid murder-suicide of Tuck Weems’s parents, complete with grainy thirty-year-old local news footage of troopers with mutton-chop sideburns. Entertainment Tonight had gotten into the act, too, by sniffing out the celebrity angle-Big Sister’s own Jamie Devers.
In fact, there were so many reporters clogging the entrance to the bridge that it was hard for Mitch to get off the island. He ventured out only because he needed groceries. Also a few things at the hardware store, where he found out from Dennis that the villagers bitterly resented how Niles Seymour was being portrayed as one of them by the media-which he was not-while Tuck Weems had been labeled as a low-life, when he was actually a decorated Vietnam vet whose family had lived in Dorset since the early 1800s.
The villagers particularly resented the presence of so many news vans and cameras and microphones. They considered it a gross intrusion on their privacy. In Dorset, the only offense that ranked worse than invading someone’s privacy was selling your land to a developer.
Lacy sent Mitch a tart one-line e-mail message from the office: Still think you can be left alone?
To which Mitch replied: I’m doing my damnedest not to think.
His paper’s Connecticut correspondent phoned him in the hope of getting Mitch’s exclusive firsthand account of how it had felt to dig up Niles Seymour’s body. Mitch didn’t want to talk about it. “Sure, I understand,” the correspondent retorted, thinking Mitch wanted the story for himself. He did not. He wanted no part of it. He didn’t like this real-world invasion. He didn’t like that his photograph had been in all of the newspapers. He thought about going back to the city until the whole mess blew over. But he didn’t want to do that either. So he stayed and tried to work on his book. Only now it seemed hard to get excited about a sagebrush ventriloquist on horseback.
So he was slouched in his easy chair, chasing doggedly after Hendrix’s “Little Wing” on his Stratocaster, when Lieutenant Mitry returned to question him for the second time.
She did not bring her sketch pad. She did not knock. She just stood there in his doorway, smiling at him sweetly. “I learn something new every day, you know that?”
“Oh yeah? What did you learn today?”
“Well, I had no idea that Don Ho ever covered Jimi Hendrix’s songs.”
“Gee. Thank you, large.”
“Hey, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Berger. I hear ‘Tiny Bubbles,’ I go to pieces.”
“I’ll remember that, Lieutenant. Now what can I…?” Mitch trailed off, frowning. “Wait, what was that noise?” he demanded suspiciously.
“What noise?” she said innocently.
“Meowing. I distinctly heard meowing.”
“Oh, that’s Baby Spice,” she said, retrieving a nylon cat carrier from the front porch. There was a small, wide-eyed kitten inside, predominantly gray, and extremely anxious to be let out of jail. “She’s free of worms and ear mites. She’s had all of her shots. And she comes with a certificate for one neutering, free of charge. She’s my best girl. All she needs is somebody to love her.”
“Lieutenant, I told you I wasn’t interested in taking in a stray cat.”
“You sounded wavery.”
“I did not,” Mitch insisted. “Look, I had one when my wife was alive. That was then. I don’t want to go there again, okay?”
“No, it’s not okay. You can’t take it out on the entire cat population that your wife died of cancer.”
Mitch peered at her, startled. He hadn’t told her anything about Maisie’s cancer. She had been checking up on him.
“We’re living in the here and now,” she went on. “This is today. And today Baby Spice needs a home.”
“Did you have to name her Baby Spice? I mean, that’s really nauseating.”
“So I’m not good with names. I know this about myself. Call her Ashley. Call her Heather. Call her any damned name you please. Just take her. You won’t regret it. She’s the sweetest little thing. She’s excellent company. And it’s a proven fact that a cat’s soothing presence helps reduce a man’s blood pressure.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my blood pressure, or at least there wasn’t.”
“Just try her out for a few days, okay?” She was already barging her way upstairs to his room with the carrier. “It doesn’t work out, I’ll take her back. No harm, no foul.”
“You’re really going to do this to me, aren’t you?”
“You’ve got that right.”
“And my feelings don’t enter into it at all?”
“Not one bit,” she affirmed. “Now I’m going to release her up here in your bedroom. They like to get acclimated in a small, contained space. She may stay up here a few days. When she’s feeling ready to come down, she will. I’ve brought you a week’s supply of food. And I’ve got a litter box in my trunk. All we need is some native sand.” Mitch could hear her cooing softly to the kitten now. “Lookie, lookie
… She just loves your bed.”
“How touching.”
The lieutenant charged back downstairs and went into his kitchen to fill a saucer with water.
“Just out of curiosity, do the authorities know about you?”
“I am the authority,” she replied, carrying the saucer back upstairs. Then she returned, empty carrier in hand. “And you may as well know this-when it comes to cats, I am utterly ruthless.”
Mitch did not know what to make of this woman at all. There was something disconcerting about the pale green eyes behind those thick horn-rimmed glasses. Her gaze was so direct, so calm, so lacking in guile or deceit, that he found himself flummoxed by her. Then again, maybe it was just that he had never been alone in a room before with someone who was licensed to carry a loaded semi-automatic weapon. Mitch’s experience with the police was extremely limited. His apartment had been broken into once. That was it. He had never been involved in a serious crime.