Stuart Woods - Dark Harbor

“Maybe you’re right. But why would the guy wake him up?”

Stone shrugged. “Maybe he had something to say to him before he shot him.”

“Like what?”

“Like, 'Here’s one from your pal, Joe,' or whoever ordered the hit.”

“You should write novels.”

“Short stories, maybe. There’s always a little story that goes with a murder. This wasn’t the burglary story, was it?”

“Nothing seems disturbed.”

“Let’s take a look outside,” Stone said.

They walked through the kitchen, where Hilda was sitting, disconsolately, drinking coffee, and out the back door. The sea was, perhaps, thirty paces away, and they avoided walking on the path, looking for footprints.

“Got a good one here,” Dino said, pointing.

“Deck shoe,” Stone said. “See the little ridges? That narrows the suspect list to everybody on the island and everybody on the coast of Maine.”

“Big deck shoe,” Dino said. “Size eleven or twelve. There are other partials here, going in both directions, but just this one good one.”

“That’s more than the cops found at Dick’s house,” Stone said. “I’d consider that a break.” He walked down to the rocky beach and pointed. “Some scrapes on the stones here; our man arrived by boat and pulled it ashore, but only a foot or two.”

“Must have been a sizable boat,” Dino said. “Not just a whatchacallit…?”

“Dinghy.”

“Yeah.”

They walked back up toward the porch, and Dino pointed: “Sand and dirt on the porch.”

“That’s about it,” Stone said. “Let’s take a look out front.”

They walked around the house.

“Too many cars and people here to find any usable footprints,” Dino said, “but I’m satisfied the killer came by boat.”

Stone walked up to the porch, where the Old Farts and Jimmy Hotchkiss had sat down. “Where’s the nearest house?”

Rawls pointed. “Over there, a couple of hundred yards.”

“The cops will want to know if anybody heard the shot.”

“Why? We know he was shot.”

“Fix the time of death,” Dino said.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Anybody got any thoughts about this killing?” Stone asked the group.

“We’ve all got the same thought,” Harley Davis said.

“Don and Dick were of different generations,” Stone said. “Would they have ever worked together on something?”

“Not recently,” Rawls said. “Don’s been retired for, I think, six years.”

“Where was his last posting?”

“Berlin.”

“And where was Dick at the time?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Could it have been Berlin?”

Rawls shrugged. “Everybody based in Europe got to Berlin sooner or later.”

Stone and Dino sat down on the front steps, and everybody fell silent.

An hour later a state police car drove up, and four men got out. Sergeant Young was the driver. “Good morning,” he said.

“No it ain’t,” Rawls replied.

“What have we got here?”

Stone and Dino took him into the house and showed him the corpse in the bedroom, then told him what they had observed since arriving, including the footprint. “Nearest house is a couple of hundred yards over there,” Stone said, pointing. “They should have heard the shot.”

“It’s a whole lot like the other killing, isn’t it?” Young asked.

“Sure is,” Stone replied.

“What did Dick Stone and Don Brown have in common?”

Stone spoke up. “They both lived on the same island, and they both worked for the same government agency. Brown retired six years ago.”

Stone and Dino left the sergeant and the crime-scene people to their work and went back to the front porch.

“Ed, when did you last talk to Don?”

“Last night, after supper, about nine.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Don called me, wanted to have lunch with the three of us tomorrow, that is, today. Said he had something to tell us.”

“Any hints about what he wanted to tell you?”

“No. Don liked to think things over before he spoke.”

“You think it had anything to do with Dick’s murder?”

“My guess is yes. He asked me to call Harley and Mack, and I did.”

The other two men nodded.

“He wouldn’t have made a lunch date if he’d intended to shoot himself,” Rawls said.

“That makes sense. Be sure and tell the sergeant about the call.” Rawls nodded. “This sort of stuff isn’t supposed to happen,” he said. “You do your work for thirty-five or forty years and you retire, and you’re out of it. Nobody comes looking for you five or six years later.”

“Don found out something,” Harley said. “God knows what.”

“Any of you know how Don spent his day yesterday?”

Jimmy Hotchkiss spoke up. “I know he was here at lunchtime, because I send the papers out to him every day.” He looked around him. “And don’t you other fellers get any ideas; I’m not running a paper-delivery service, except for a couple of people, like Don, who couldn’t get in the store easy.”

“So we need to know what he was doing between lunchtime and bedtime.”

Sergeant Young had appeared in the front doorway. “Hilda says he got in his car and went out about one o’clock. He had this way of getting his scooter in and out of the trunk. We’ll ask around, see if anybody saw him around the island.”

“You need us anymore?” Stone asked.

The sergeant shook his head. “I’ll call you if I think of anything.”

Stone and Dino got into the MG and headed down the drive.

“Dino,” Stone said, “I think it would be good if you moved into the house, into Esme’s bedroom. Arrington can bunk with me, and there’s another bedroom for Peter.”

“Why move? To cover your ass?”

“That and because there’s no alarm system in the guest house.”

“Oh.”

TWO DAYS LATER, Stone stood on the tarmac and watched the Centurion Studios’ Gulfstream IV land at Rockland Airport. Peter was the first down the airplane’s stairs, at a run. He was six now and taller than when Stone had last seen him the year before. His mother followed, carrying her overnight case, and the two pilots then dealt with the luggage.

There were hugs, then Stone loaded their luggage into his airplane. “Peter, I think we’ll let you be copilot today, and your mother can be the passenger.”

The boy was delighted. Soon Stone had them buckled in and was running through his checklist, giving Peter a running commentary.

“I hope this isn’t going to be like the last ride with you,” the boy said.

Stone laughed. On their last ride Stone had been at the controls of a helicopter, a machine he hadn’t known how to fly, had made a very rough landing, and they were both lucky to be alive. “I think you’ll find this a smoother trip; shorter, too.”

They lifted off and turned out over Penobscot Bay. “There’s our island,” Stone said, pointing. “Can you see it, Arrington?”

Arlington could hear and speak from the rear through her headset. “Yes, it’s beautiful.”

“There’s our landing strip,” Stone said to Peter.

“It looks a lot shorter than the one we just landed on,” Peter said.

“It is, but my airplane is a lot smaller than the Centurion jet, so it can use shorter strips.” Stone lined up for the runway, announced his intentions over the radio and looked for traffic. A moment later they were on the runway and braking. Dino sat in the station wagon, waiting for them.

They stopped at the Dark Harbor Shop for the papers and an ice cream cone for Peter, then continued to the house.

“It’s lovely, Stone,” Arrington said. “How did you find it?”