Nine Lives(9)

“Yeah, I guess I could tell it was him, as well.”

There were about four other members of the Kennewick Police Department in the vicinity of the scene, but no one except for Jim Robichaud, first to arrive, had gotten close to the body. The Maine State Police had been alerted, and their crime scene and forensics people were on the way.

“What’s that?” Lisa said.

Sam looked toward where she was pointing. It was a piece of white paper, or maybe an envelope, crumpled up in Frank’s left hand.

“I was wondering about that myself,” Sam said.

“Should we get it?”

“Better not. It’s not going anywhere, and it might be evidence.”

“Evidence of what? You think there was a crime here?”

“It does look like someone pushed his head pretty deep into the sand.”

“You don’t think he just keeled over from a heart attack, and the tide did the rest. I know you’re not from around here, but you’ve been to the beach, right? If you stand at the edge of the water the sand sucks your feet into it.”

“No, you’re right. It just feels like something else happened here.”

As soon as he’d said the words, Sam wondered if he actually was imagining a crime where there was none. Frank Hopkins was not a young man. Not healthy either, judging by how much time he spent drinking at his own bar. The most likely explanation for what had happened was that he’d been on a morning walk and his heart had simply gone out. Sam knew that he was prone to see criminal activity where there was none, and maybe he was doing it again.

Lisa shrugged, then turned back to look toward Micmac Road. She thought she heard a vehicle and she was right. Three metallic-blue SUVs were pulling up along the edge of the road. There was also a local news van arriving from the other direction. “They’re here,” she said, stretching out the vowels and Sam laughed because she was imitating that little girl from Poltergeist. He began to take long strides toward the arriving officers.

It was much later in the day when Sam, back at the station, learned about what had been found in Frank’s hand. A torn envelope addressed to Frank. There’d also been a piece of paper, damp from the sea but still legible, and presumably originating from inside the envelope. On that piece of paper was a list of nine names, including Frank’s. The letter had been taken directly to State Police headquarters, but Sam saw a photograph and read through the names twice. None were immediately familiar to him. There was also a photograph of the front of the envelope. No stamp, no postmark, just an address label. It was bewildering, a true mystery. Not that it wouldn’t have been a mystery had the envelope not been there. The initial, unofficial coroner’s report stated that there were bruises on the back of Frank Hopkins’s neck indicating that someone had held his face down in the water until he’d drowned. Who would want to kill Frank Hopkins on his morning walk? A mugger? A jilted lover? Both seemed highly unlikely.

Sam, who had been a police detective in Kennewick for fifteen years now, knew Frank Hopkins fairly well. He’d been one of the first citizens Sam had had contact with when he’d moved to Maine from Houma, Louisiana, back in 1999. He’d interviewed for the job on a sunny October weekend, then arrived for it five weeks later in early December, and Kennewick was already encrusted in a grungy layer of hardened snow. His new colleagues told him it was slightly early to feel like Siberia in southern Maine, that they’d just been ambushed by an early nor’easter followed by a long cold snap. There’d been lots of jokes along the lines of “Welcome to paradise,” and “I hope you brought your long johns,” but, secretly, Sam was thrilled to be greeted by the snowy beauty of New England. He’d spent his first thirty-five years either in Louisiana or Jamaica, where his family was from, and neither truly felt like home to him. He’d longed, for reasons mostly mysterious to him, for somewhere else. And the weathered houses of Kennewick, the low gray skies, had felt right.

His first official act as Kennewick’s only police detective had been to visit the Windward Resort to follow up on a suspected theft. He’d been greeted by Frank Hopkins, a man with a Maine accent so thick that it sounded just a little bit fake to Sam’s untrained ear. The cash register at the bar of the Windward had been cleared out—no more than a couple of hundred dollars, Frank said—and he suspected a recently terminated employee named Ben Gagnon who’d been working as a busboy in the dining room. Ben, a local kid, had been let go for calling in sick one too many times.

“I fired him yesterday,” Frank had said, “but Barbara, one of the cleaning women, told me she saw him this morning, and he told her he’d come in for his last paycheck. Anyhoo, he did no such thing because we mail out all the paychecks, and Barbara, another Barbara, the one who works the bar, said that all the paper money was gone from the register.”

“Was the cash register locked?”

“Well, yeah. Except that the key to unlock it is hanging off a hook right below the back of the bar, so it wouldn’t take a genius to pull off this particular crime. Look, I’m friends with Ben’s mother and to tell the truth, I’m not sure I even want to press charges. I’m just worried that if he thinks he got away with it once he might try to get away with it again. Does that make sense to you?”

“It does,” Sam said. “Where do you think Ben is now?”