“Where are you going?” he asked her sleepily, sprawled there in bed.
“To start dinner.”
“Now that you mention it, I’m starved,” he admitted. “Only, wait, there’s something else I wanted to say to you. Let’s disappear from this place for a couple of days. Jump in the car tomorrow morning and head for the Cape. Find ourselves a little inn near a beach somewhere. What do you say?”
She flashed her wraparound smile at him. “I say, what time do we leave?”
That was when her phone rang. It was the 911 dispatcher. A call had come in from the Sullivan residence on Sour Cherry Lane. Amber Sullivan phoning to report she’d just heard some sort of a fight out in the lane. Followed by the sound of a man screaming.
There were plenty of lights on at Kimberly and Jen’s, as well as across the lane at the Procters. But the lane appeared to be deserted as Des eased past their cottages. Until little Molly suddenly loomed before her there in the road-standing out in front of the Sullivan cottage with her eyeglasses shining in the headlights.
Des rolled down her window and called out, “Girl, what are you doing out here at this time of night?”
“I heard something,” Molly answered in a quavering voice. “Somebody’s hurt.”
Des nosed her cruiser up to the pile of cedar mulch in Amber and Keith’s driveway and got out, flashlight in hand. The night air was very heavy and still. It smelled of a skunk that had been marking its territory. With her light, Des looked the girl over carefully as Molly stood there in her UConn jersey, baggy shorts and floppy socks. She seemed frightened but unharmed. “Were you up in your tree house for the night?”
Molly nodded her head, swallowing.
“Did you see anything?”
She shook her head gravely.
“Well, what did you hear?”
“Voices. Men’s voices. They came from out there somewhere.” Molly pointed past the Sullivan place toward the utter darkness at the end of the lane.
Des shined her light out there. Saw nothing other than wild, overgrown brush crowding both sides of the pavement. The road dead-ended at Jersey safety barriers after a hundred feet or so. Beyond the barriers was the bank of the Connecticut River.
“How many men did you hear?”
“Two, I think.”
“And you’re sure they were both men?”
“W-What do you mean?”
“Could one of them have been a woman?’
“I don’t know. Maybe. One of them… he screamed.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know. I listened real hard, but I didn’t hear anything else.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t see anyone?”
Molly gazed up at her, mystified. “Like who?”
“Someone running away from here. Or driving away. Did anyone pass by your place after you heard the scream?”
“I didn’t see anybody. But I-I was…” She faltered, lowering her gaze.
“You were what?” Des asked, hearing footsteps now. Amber and Keith were approaching them.
“Scared to come down.” Molly let out a sob. “I hid in my tree house until I saw you coming.”
Meaning she may not have seen someone fleeing in her direction. Des knelt and hugged the frightened girl, her thoughts on Grisky’s team in the woods. What had they seen and heard? And where in the hell were they? “You did the right thing, Molly. You were smart to be afraid. But you don’t have to be afraid now, okay?”
Actually, Amber looked plenty scared herself. Those big brown eyes of hers were huge and shining. “Des, I really, really hope I didn’t get you out here on a wild goose chase,” she said in a frantic voice.
Beefy, blond Keith trailed along a few steps behind her clutching a bottle of Sam Adams. He wore a T-shirt, shorts and a pissed off expression. A vibe of tension was coming off of the two lovebirds.
The source of which tumbled straight out of Keith’s mouth: “I am totally sorry about this, Des,” he growled. “I told her not to waste your time.”
“Stop being such a know-it-all,” fired back Amber, all ninety pounds of her in a halter top and linen drawstring trousers. “I am a sentient adult being. I know what I heard.”
“What you ‘heard’ was a couple of raccoons,” Keith argued. “I’ve heard ‘em fighting in the night a million times-and you’d swear it was a person being gutted with a grapefruit knife.”
“It wasn’t raccoons,” Molly said in a low, insistent voice.
“You see?” Amber huffed at him. “Molly heard them, too.”
Keith shook his head disgustedly. “Fine, whatever.”
“I heard them when I was taking out the trash.” Amber gazed toward the end of the lane same as Molly had. “They were down there somewhere.”
“And how about you?” Des asked Keith.
“I was watching the Red Sox game in the living room,” he replied, swigging from his beer. “Didn’t hear a thing.”
“How are our boys doing tonight?”
He made a face. “Toronto’s killing us.”
“That figures.” Des looked over in the direction of the Procter and Beckwith houses, guessing that no one in either place had heard anything. If they had, they’d be out here in the street telling her about it by now. “I’m going to ask you folks to please follow me, okay?”
She strode back to her ride with the three of them and left them standing there in the driveway. Backed out into the road and pointed the cruiser so that its high beams lit up the end of the lane right down to the Jersey barriers. Then she got out and slowly checked out the wild brush growing alongside of the pavement, left hand gripping her flashlight, right hand resting lightly on the holster of her Sig. She trained the light on the tangled profusion of sour cherry trees, blackberry bushes, forsythia and lilac. She saw no broken branches. No signs of trampling. The brush did not appear to be disturbed on either side of the lane.
Until, that is, she got to within twenty feet of the barriers. Here, the lane began to dip downward as it neared the shallows of the river, the wild brush giving way to boggy salt marsh where Spartina grass and phragmites grew.
Here, the marsh grasses were newly trampled. There were mucky shoe prints on the pavement. And there was more.
There was blood. There was a lot of blood. And droplets leading down toward the water.
Stepping carefully around them, Des approached the riverbank and waved her light out into the water. She wondered if someone had pitched a body out there-figuring it would float out to sea on the current.
She did not have to wonder for long. She spotted the floater maybe fifty feet downriver where a dead tree had washed up in the mud. One of its branches had snagged him as he’d drifted past. Or at least it looked like a he from where she stood. The body lay facedown in the water, bobbing up and down in the gentle current of the river. Des didn’t want to disturb the crime scene. But she also didn’t want the body to break free and drift out into Long Island Sound. So she went down there and fetched it, keeping a watchful eye out for shoeprints or any other disturbances in the mud as she tiptoed her way along the water’s edge.
It was a man, all right. Dressed in a light blue shirt, khaki trousers and hiking shoes. Gently, she untangled him from the branches that held him there. Then she pulled him ashore and flopped him over, her abdominal muscles clenching as the pang of recognition hit.
It was Richard Procter. Someone had cut his throat from ear to ear.
It took the uniformed troopers less than ten minutes to get there from the Troop F barracks. They immediately set up a vehicular cordon all of the way back up Turkey Neck at Old Shore Road. And another cordon around the perimeter of the crime scene itself, which included all of Sour Cherry Lane, the riverfront and, at Des’s suggestion, the woods between Sour Cherry and the Peck’s Point Nature Preserve.
Soon after that, the Major Crime Squad crime scene technicians rolled up in their blue and white cube vans along with a death investigator from the Medical Examiner’s office.
By now it was nearly midnight. The residents of Sour Cherry were huddled together out in the lane like the survivors of an apartment house fire. By now Des had expected to see or hear from Grisky. But she’d had no contact from him or Cavanaugh or anyone else associated with Operaton Burrito King. She didn’t know what to make of that beyond the fact that they seemed content to let the normal investigative process unfold. So she went ahead and did her normal thing, which was to conduct preliminary interviews of the neighbors.