Golden Girl(51)

“Did the janitor find the clothes as well?”

“No, just the shoes.”

Just the shoes. That makes no sense. And what’s valuable, from a forensics standpoint, is the clothes—the shorts and the tank—in case there are flecks of paint. Every contact leaves a trace.

“Do you want me to bring the DeSantis kid in?” Dixon asks.

“Not yet,” the Chief says. “I need to think.”



The Chief asks Dixon to air-freight the shoes to Lisa Hitt on the Cape. He should probably request a homicide detective from the state police—the Greek would be his best option—but he doesn’t want to call one in just yet. The Greek is a busy man and they have no forensic evidence tying this death to any suspects.

Cruz DeSantis is a smart kid—he’s too smart to tamper with evidence, too smart to throw bloody sneakers into the trash at his place of employment. Right? The Chief will go talk to him.

It’s eleven o’clock in the morning. A phone call to the Stop and Shop confirms that Cruz is working. The Chief arranges for him to take a break so that Cruz can help with an ongoing investigation.

The Chief is waiting out back by the employee entrance when Cruz comes out. He looks…tired, sick, traumatized.

“Cruz.”

“I heard the news already,” Cruz says. “I work here, Chief Kapenash.”

“Right,” the Chief says. “Let’s take a drive.”

They have only thirty minutes, so they can’t go far. The Chief goes around the small rotary, then the big rotary. Traffic is bad; everyone is driving while talking on a cell phone or texting. It’s amazing there aren’t motor-vehicle homicides every day.

“I know Donald found running shoes in the trash of the break room,” Cruz says. “I didn’t put them there. Why would I have Vivi’s sneakers?”

“They went missing from the hospital,” the Chief says. “Somewhere between the hospital and the station, we lost track of them. The clothes still haven’t been recovered.”

“Check my car, check my house—I don’t have the clothes. I never touched or saw or knew about any of this. Why would I?”

“Calm down, son,” the Chief says.

“I’ve been pulled out of work to ride around with the chief of police,” Cruz says. “Would you be calm in this situation?”

“No.”

“I didn’t hit Vivi,” Cruz says, and again, there’s something in the tone and timbre of his voice that makes the Chief want to believe him. “I found her. Finding her wasn’t a crime.”

The Chief takes a left off Polpis Road toward Monomoy. It’s been three years since the last homicide on Nantucket. The maid of honor in a lavish wedding at a waterfront estate called Summerland was found floating in the harbor. They chalked that up to an accident, but it still irks the Chief and he knows it bothers the Greek as well. If Ed called the Greek now, he would jump at the chance to investigate this hit-and-run—maybe. Or maybe he’d think it was a lost cause, or maybe he’d think the answer was sitting right there in the front seat.

“You lied to me, Cruz.”

The kid says nothing.

“You told me you were driving to the Howes’ from your house. But you weren’t.”

“No.”

This admission is a start. “Where were you coming from?”

“Hooper Farm.”

“What were you doing on Hooper Farm?”

“Does it matter?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if it didn’t.”

“I went to see someone.”

“A girl?”

“This kid, Peter Bridgeman.”

Bridgeman? Ed thinks. “He’s Zach and Pamela’s kid?”

“Yeah, he’s my year. Just graduated. I needed to talk to him.”

“At seven in the morning? What was so urgent?”

“Something.”

“Son.”

“It’s just high-school stuff, Chief, okay? But since you asked, that’s where I was coming from.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I didn’t want to get into it.”

“You do realize that a woman is dead, and, like it or not, you’re part of the investigation, and you owed me the truth no matter the question.” He’s using his full-on chief-of-police voice now and he can see from a glimpse of the kid’s face in the rearview mirror that he’s nervous.

“Yes,” Cruz says. “But I don’t want to talk about that part. It has nothing to do with anything.”

“Except you were upset, yes? You were distracted? You ran a stop sign and went speeding down Surfside Road. Officer Falco almost pulled you over. And then a few minutes later, he got the call about Ms. Howe. So you can see how lying to me was a problem.”

“I did run the stop sign and I was speeding,” Cruz says. “I was upset and I was distracted. But I didn’t hit Vivi. I found her. She was on the ground, bleeding from her mouth, her leg sliced open. Someone hit her and left her there, Chief, and I pulled over and called 911. The woman was like a mother to me!” His voice works the edge of tears and then, like a flipped switch, it turns to anger. “Why don’t you just charge me with her murder? Everyone on this island thinks I did it—my friends, my coworkers, my so-called community. I’m Black, so I must be a criminal, right?”