Beach Wedding(55)

I thought about the closing statement he had given. How stirring it was. How brave he was. How honest. As I looked back at it now, I realized they must have tried to bribe him.

Then I thought about him out there on the water by himself the day he died. Had another boat come over to him acting in distress? Or maybe a scuba diver had gotten the jump on him before he knew what was happening. Grabbed him from behind and dragged him under.

As I cruised along, I suddenly realized the real reason why I had come home.

Because originally, I wasn’t going to. Despite it being Tom’s big day, I had planned to blow it off. After I got my life going in Philly, I had never looked back. Why start all that up again? I had thought. All that pain.

But at the last second as I lifted the phone to tell Tom my BS excuse, something made me, almost told me to, hang up.

As I rolled through the dark steel-colored waves, I realized now what that something was.

It was my father.

Even in death, his soul had never stopped yearning for justice. And it was that unsatisfied yearning, now more than twenty years old, that had finally pulled me, like a sunken anchor and chain pulls at a drifting ship, all the way back home.

Why would somebody do that? I wondered. Kill him? Kill two more people?

What did Hailey have to do with it? Or Dennis Tapley? Had Dennis Tapley done it himself?

I didn’t know.

I throttled the engines up.

Yet, I thought.



75

I checked all my charts twice as I motored straight as an arrow to the Bellport Bay Inlet. When I arrived, I slid the boat into Neutral as some booze cruise ferry-sized vessel with a lot of jacked-looking tan men on its deck suddenly appeared.

When it was safely past, I throttled forward again and hooked a right into the Great South Bay.

And then there it was on my left, my destination.

The place where corrupt Suffolk County police chief Dennis Tapley had his own beach house.

Fire Island.

I looked over at the dark scrub pine–covered land strip as I pulled farther south.

Like the beach where Sandhill Point was located back in Southampton, Fire Island was just one of the long chain of thin barrier islands along the southern coast of Long Island known as the Outer Barrier.

But unlike the beach on Southampton, Fire Island was extremely remote. Though it technically could be reached by car along a bridge near Central Islip, most of the narrow thirty-one-mile-long island itself actually banned motor vehicles.

It was about an hour later when I slowed and began to head closer into shore beside a famous Fire Island beach community known as Point O’Woods.

Point O’Woods, where Tapley lived, wasn’t as exclusive a summer playground as Southampton or East Hampton, but with its mostly summering Manhattan residents, it was by far the snootiest community on Fire Island.

How Tapley had a beach house in such an expensive community on a cop’s salary, I didn’t know. But I had a guess or two.

A few minutes later, I put the boat in Neutral and let it drift as I opened the envelope Marvin had given me and smoothed its contents out on the console. Marvin had asked around for me and through the south shore cop grapevine had scored big-time.

I looked down at the blown-up Google satellite map with Tapley’s small bayside beach house circled in red.

After I took out a pair of binoculars, it was another fifteen minutes of powering in closer and farther south before I finally oriented myself.

When I spotted the roof of Tapley’s house five minutes later, I put down the binocs and opened the cooler I had brought and took out the equipment.

The Digital Receiver Technology (DRT) unit known as a dirtbox that I removed from my bag was a small black box about the size of a trade paperback. Into one of its jacks I inserted an antenna, and into another port, my laptop.

I pointed it at Tapley’s house and turned it on and brought up the software on my computer. The dirtbox worked by mimicking a real cell site, so now any mobile phone texts or emails or phone calls that anyone in the Tapley household made would be coming to me.

As I pointed its antenna directly at the Tapley residence, I knew I was flat out entering illegal territory now. It was sketchy enough that we used such tech semiofficially for municipal law enforcement on my drug task force down in Philly.

The fact that I was now using it in my dad’s old case could most definitely be held against me in a court of law.

But it didn’t matter.

After finding out about my dad, that he might have actually been murdered, I didn’t care. I was in it for all the marbles.

I powered on my computer and stared at the screen, waiting for it to light.

I was going to find out what the hell was at the bottom of all this, no matter how dark or how deep it went.



76

I was still sitting there an hour later.

As far as I could tell, Tapley’s beach house was empty. I could see in through his back deck’s sliders and there hadn’t been any movement. And according to my illegal dirtbox, not one cell phone call had come out of it or text or email.

I continued to sit up there in the wheelhouse watching and listening some more. I decided to drink a warm beer by myself as the sun went down. It was a spectacular evening, the sun over Suffolk County red orange, the sky teal.

I wanted to text Viv and ask if she was seeing it, too, but I hadn’t brought my cell phone. Viv had taken it with her to throw off any surveillance on me while she and the other bridesmaids went into the city to pick up their dresses.