Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

The neon tape stretched from one of the evergreens on the east side of the path across to the old stone wall that bordered the property on the west. It ran north on the top of the wall for about five car lengths, then squared off by wrapping around a sturdy scrub oak that stood like a sentinel at the crown of the ridge.

“We figure Miss Lascar was driving back in toward the house sometime in the late afternoon. Still have no idea where she was coming from or exactly what time it was. The rental car was a white Mustang convertible, top down when she was hit. She couldn’t have been going more than ten or fifteen miles an hour on this part of the roadway.“

He was right about that. The dirt path was so deeply rutted and uneven that most cars bottomed out on it and you had to slow down to a crawl to maneuver the craters.

“We had a field team down from Boston yesterday,” Agent Waldron droned on, ‘but they didn’t come up with very much out here.“

“Outdoor crime scenes are the worst,” Mike commiserated. “Very hard to define.”

We had worked a few together in Central Park and in Morningside Park so I knew exactly what he meant.

Without an eyewitness and with no clear boundaries like the four walls of a room in an apartment or the limited confines of a rooftop it was a tough job for cops to know how far to extend the search for clues. Close it off five feet too soon and you’re likely to overlook an essential piece of evidence, but fail to limit it reasonably at some point and you’re pulling in all kinds of extraneous crap that leads your investigators off course. “Our best guess at this point is that the killer was concealed on the far side of the stone wall. It provides a natural cover, better than a duck blind, as well as a perfect brace to steady the gun. The target drove in, moving, but nice and slow. Whoever did this was a good shot. Probably wasn’t much more than ten or twelve feet from Miss Lascar. She took two, maybe three shots to the head and neck. Not much left to help us there.“

“What kind of gun are we talking about?” Mike asked.

Waldron hesitated. I knew he wanted to be a hard-ass and not tell us anything, but his instincts seemed to be fighting that. It looked as if he actually knew he might get more feedback from a genuine Homicide detective like Mike than from Wally.

“We don’t have a coroner’s report yet. My guess is a high-powered rifle. Lots of internal destruction is what I heard from the guys at the scene. Skull was shattered.”

I winced at that description, although I had seen its image flashing in my mind’s eye thousands of times in the past thirty-six hours.

Waldron continued.

“She must have been killed instantly. When her body was jolted by the shots we figure the car lurched and went smack into that big tree. That’s just where it was when she was found.“

Wally took over the narrative now, eager to give his men the credit for discovering Isabella’s body.

“Yeah, I went home to dinner ‘bout six. Call came in from your neighbor, Mr. Patterson. He said his dog you know that collie he’s got, Alex? well, he said his dog came home, feet all covered with blood. Wasn’t cut nowhere, much as he whimpered, but he was bloodier than hell. Mr. Patterson said there must have been a big animal killed up there, makin’ so much blood. He was mad can’t stand it when hunters start up your way before the season and asked my boys to go on up to look.”

The secondhand description of the car, and of what remained of Isabella, was gruesome.

“Damn dog was too nosy. Got his front paw prints all over the side of the passenger door where the blood was drippin‘ down, that’s how he got so full of it. The poor young lady’s head or whatever you can call it was resting on the top of that door. She was blown clear out of her seat lucky there wasn’t no roof on that car or she would’ve split that in half. The blood was everywhere.”

Waldron interrupted to tell us that Wally’s crew had done a good job.

“They didn’t touch anything. Just cordoned it off and called for the state police. The troopers brought us in on it because they had assumed you were the victim, Alex. Thought if you were in Massachusetts for business on any part of your trip, it might be federal jurisdiction. Someone in Wally’s office knew you’d been cross-designated a few months back to work on some interstate child pornography case. Anyway, Wally says you’ve always got work with you when you’re up here can’t leave what you do behind you at the end of the week.”

I nodded my understanding.

“Are there photographs of the body in the car?” Mike asked.

“Of course. The scene was thoroughly processed by the team of agents.”

“Anybody hear shots?”

We were still in Wally’s territory.

“Not so’s we know, Mike. This is a pretty lonely hilltop, and nobody’s let us know they heard anything at all. You got some summer people like Alex whose houses are sittin‘ empty this time of year, and some old-timers like Patterson who’s so deaf I could blast my siren in the middle of his living room and he wouldn’t look up from his jigsaw puzzle. Finest kind.”

Mike had already walked over to the wall and was examining the large rocks carefully for traces of the gun or its residue. It was obvious that he would have loved to come up with a significant piece of evidence that the feds had overlooked, and equally obvious that Luther Waldron, who eyed him closely, wouldn’t give him that chance.

“Let’s go on up to your house, Alex. That’s where we hope you can be helpful. You’ll know what belongs to Miss Lascar and whether anything is seriously out of place or missing.”

“Sure.” My eyes swept the area once more as we headed for our cars. No body, no blood, no Mustang, no gun, no killer just yellow tape strung out in an enormous square to bring home the reality that a murder had been committed on that isolated piece of road, less than five hundred yards from my house.

I led the way as I steered our rental car around the taped area through the tall weeds, behind the tree into which Isabella’s car had crashed, and back onto the uneven dirt path that climbed to its peak and then rolled over and started downhill toward the clearing beyond the thick cluster of evergreens. In less than a quarter of a mile we emerged from the shadows of the trees and Mike was able to see, for the first time, the incredible vista at the end of Daggett’s Pond Way.

“Spectacular!” he gasped, as I paused at the divide in the roadway where my drive split off from the others and the granite gate post to my house defined the beginning of my paradise.

“There are lots of great views on this island, Mike, but not one of them is any better than this.”

The old farmhouse is a very simple building, gray shingled and unpretentious, sitting on a green rise that flows down to the water, at the point where Daggett and Nashaquitsa ponds meet. Over the years I had added border gardens along the stone walls, filled with day lilies and nicotiana, astilbe and asters, and had replaced an acre of untamed weed with a wildflower field that threw up a colorful sea of poppies, loosestrife, and cosmos. Indestructible lilacs rooted beside my front door as they had for more than a century, and impatiens a flower perfectly suited to my temperament lined the sides of the original foundation and bloomed till the first fall frost.

But it was the view beyond that took my breath away every time I came back to it, so I watched with delight as Mike tried to take it all in.

“What direction are we facing? What body of water is that?“

”You’re looking north over the pond. There’s a tiny fishing village there called Menemsha, then beyond that is Vineyard Sound. Another strip of land the Elizabeth Islands and off in the distance is America. Cape Cod.“ The combination of dozens of subtle shadings of blue and green was endless today, as the sun danced on the water and the sweeping scope of almost three hundred degrees gave us the illusion of being, literally, on top of the world. Wally and Luther pulled in behind us and drew me back to the real purpose of our visit. It was a strange and uncomfortable feeling to see Luther walk to the front door of the house and hold it open for me. I had never met him until one hour ago and yet he had already been inside and knew his way around my home, without ever having had an invitation.