Chris Grabenstein - Tilt-a-Whirl

“We should work out a security detail with State,” Ceepak suggests. “24-hour coverage….”

“Done and done.”

It's like they're back in the Army, protecting another innocent kid, hunting down another bad guy.

Only this time, it isn't a chaplain.

It's a crazy guy with googly eyes, a goatee, and a gun.

The pancakes delivered to Ashley look good. I can see the chocolate chips melting inside the soft, spongy flapjacks.

The sketch artist is gone.

They finished the composite of the killer about fifteen minutes ago and are taking a little break before moving on to the rough stuff, the “tell-us-what-you-saw” stuff.

Meanwhile, my stomach is rumbling. It's almost noon and all I've eaten today is about six cups of black coffee. No sugar. No cream. Nada. I'd do some Oreos from the vending machine but I'm all out of loose change and the dollar slot never works, just spits your crinkled bills back at you.

I saw the sketch before the artist hustled it out the door. Our suspect resembles a roadie for the Grateful Dead who hit rock bottom sometime around 1974. A crazy, aging hippie. A beach bum junkie.

There's a TV mounted on the wall behind me that's usually tuned to ESPN or one of the other sports channels. Since there are few interrogations, this viewing room is mostly used for catching whatever game is on. Today, however, the set is tuned to Fox, the first network to have “live” coverage of the “Murder Down The Shore,” as they call it.

The TV guys always like to give disasters snappy titles. I'm surprised this one isn't called “Beach Blanket Bang-o,” seeing how many bullets were used.

They cut to State Crime Scene Investigator Saul Slominsky.

This I have to hear.

I turn up the TV.

The mayor of Sea Haven, a youngish guy named Hugh Sinclair who owns a bunch of motels, car washes, and ice cream shops up and down the island, is standing next to Slobbinsky.

I wonder if Hizzoner knows his son is dating the victim's daughter.

Maybe. He sure looks glum, like people are checking out of his motels in droves now that there's a long-haired, bug-eyed, smack-junkie killer running amok on our pristine sandy beaches. This is bad for business, worse than riptide or pink jellyfish-even worse than that shark in Jaws because, face it, to avoid the damn shark, all you really had to do was stay out of the water.

Slominsky has about two dozen microphones stacked in front of him. I can tell he finally dragged a comb through his greasy hair and brushed up his moustache. At the moment, no egg is visible anywhere on his face.

“At approximately 7:15 this morning,” Slominsky starts, trying to sound solemn and serious by lowering his otherwise whiny voice, “Mr. Reginald Hart was the victim of an armed robbery here at the Sunnyside Playland Amusement Park. He was shot seven times at point-blank range in the chest.”

I'm glad Ceepak's not in here listening to Slobbinsky blow it.

I'm only a summer cop, but even I know you don't give away all the gory details of a crime when your suspect is still at large. It helps you eliminate the weirdos who'd confess to anything. Doesn't Slominsky watch any cop shows at all?

“Mr. Hart was pronounced dead at the scene by the Ocean County Medical Examiner. Fortunately, Mr. Hart's thirteen-year-old daughter, who was with him at the time of the murder, escaped and has helped us put together this composite sketch….”

Oh, great. Now Slobbinsky's telling the perp he needs to find Ashley and gun her down, the sooner the better.

The kid can ID you, mister.

Slominsky should hire one of those airplanes to buzz the beach dragging a long banner off its tail: “Hey-Don't Forget To Kill Ashley Too!”

He holds up the charcoal sketch. The artist did a good job. The guy looks completely scary. Eyes popping out of sockets, long scraggly hair, a stringy goatee, and a dragon tattoo crawling up his neck.

“Who is this asshole?”

A woman in a very short skirt has entered my room.

“The hippie?”

“The asshole holding up the sketch.”

“Saul Slominsky,” I tell her. “State Police Crime Scene Investigator.”

“Jesus. What an idiot. You a cop?” She's looking at my shorts and baseball cap. She's only a year or two older than me, but she's a grownup wearing a short-skirted business suit and I'm sitting here in my playclothes.

“Are you with the police?” she asks again, with that don't-make-me-ask-again-dummy tone underlining every word.

“Yeah. Sort of. Part time. Yeah. Cop.”

What is it about women with long tan legs and tiny skirts that turns me into a mushmouth? If I knew, I couldn't tell you right now, because my mouth is full of mush.

She's got very strong calf muscles, the kind that could crack walnuts, and this light blue tribal tattoo wrapping around her ankle that lets every man who sees it know that beneath her all-business exterior, she can be a naughty girl, too.

“I'm Cynthia Stone. Mr. Hart's attorney?”

“Unh-hunh.”

“They told me to wait in here. Is that right?”

“Uh-”

I don't know why I open my mouth. She's not waiting for me to answer anything.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

She looks good when she swears like that. She puts her hands on her hips and sticks out her chest, all huffy. She has a big chest and one of those miraculous bras that pushes everything up and makes it all look even bigger.

“I can't believe this shit. We were down here on business-”

“You and Mr. Hart?”

“Yes. Real estate transaction.”

The way she says it? She's warning me not to even think impure thoughts about the nature of her relationship with her boss, a guy at least thirty or forty years older than her. But then again, Mr. Hart was a billionaire and, hey, what's thirty or forty years between friends when one of them's worth thirty or forty billion dollars?

“Why the hell didn't they call me? I was at the beach house.”

“Unh-hunh.”

“I'm using the guest cottage.”

“Sure.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Can't really say.”

“Because you don't really know?”

“Something like that.”

Ms. Stone sits down and crosses her legs, obscuring my view of them. She's shifted her attention to Ashley and Jane and Ceepak on the other side of our window.

I take in a deep breath. It's been a tough morning.

V anilla, patchouli, sandalwood.

I only know that's what I'm smelling because that's what Ceepak said it was back at the Tilt-A-Whirl when he wondered whether young Ashley purchased perfume at Victoria's Secret.

Maybe Ashley doesn't.

But I bet Ms. Stone does.

Malloy's roadblock, we hear, is moving more smoothly.

Now that they kind of know who they're looking for, they don't need to stop every car on the causeway, just the ones with hippie burnouts riding inside. I figure all VW bugs and microbuses are considered totally suspicious.

So far, the guys canvassing the beach and streets around Playland have come up with diddly-squat. No witnesses, no one who heard the nine pops go off. Seven bullets hit Hart, two hit the turtle shell behind him. Ceepak told me he got a good look at all nine holes before the State boys showed up. He sounded like he was describing the front end of a golf course.

The only jogger on the beach at 7:15 A.M. was this guy with his iPod earbuds stuffed in so deep, the music was melting his earwax. He didn't hear a thing. Neither did my buddy Joey T., the beach sweeper. His tractor makes all kinds of noise when he's out there waking up the gulls.

Here at the house, Ashley's mother showed up and that means our eyewitness stopped talking.