The Shadow Box(62)

Jen leaned forward. “I think it is,” she said. She grabbed a pen and wrote out the alphabet. “With a curve like that, it could be one of several letters. But see that little rise on the left? Looks like the top of the R’s vertical.”

It took a moment, but then he nodded. Now that she had put the idea in his mind, he could see the R.

“And look at the far end of the tape, just below it. A little squiggle—the tail of a lowercase g.”

Conor didn’t hear that last part because he had focused on the crumpled bumper again. His mind raced back to the day of Claire’s disappearance, to the hit-and-run on the Baldwin Bridge. A speeding black pickup truck had clipped the back of a Subaru with enough force to send it smashing through the guardrail, into the safety fence.

Conor checked the incident report. He had arrived at the scene at 3:30 that afternoon. The bridge spanned the Connecticut River, between Black Hall and Hawthorne. A drive from the Chase house to the bridge would take five minutes. That fit smack into the middle of Conor’s timeline.

Conor had gone straight from the scene of the accident to the Woodward-Lathrop Gallery, where Claire hadn’t shown up for her show.

There were cameras on both ends of the Baldwin Bridge. Conor tapped a code into his computer and brought up the live feeds. Then he typed in the date and approximate time and got footage for 3:20 p.m. through 3:40 p.m. on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. He knew that troopers had checked this video, but Conor was looking for something else—a getaway from the attack at Catamount Bluff.

At the exact time stamp of 3:23 p.m., he saw the truck smash into the Subaru.

“Whoa,” Jen said as they watched the truck strike the car’s rear end, spin the vehicle around, and keep going. “What’s that?”

“That’s our truck,” he said.

Conor enlarged the image so he could see the driver head-on through the windshield. His face was not visible, because he was wearing a ski mask. Conor felt a combination of triumph, because this was obviously the same truck seen on the gallery’s video of someone dumping evidence from the attacks on Claire and Sallie, and frustration, because the mask hid the driver’s face.

“Who are you?” Jen asked out loud.

Conor didn’t say anything; he was staring at a taped-over word on the driver’s door, wondering what it could be.





34





TOM


Tom picked up the phone to call his brother. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said when Conor answered.

“I’d like that, too, but I’ve got these two cases,” Conor said.

“This is about the Bensons,” Tom said. “I could head to the barracks, or you want to come down to the dock?”

“The dock. I’ll take a break,” Conor said.

Forty-five minutes later, Tom watched his brother’s Ford Interceptor pull through the coast guard pier security gate and park in the lot beside a trailer holding an RIB—a rigid inflatable boat. Tom stepped outside. The day had started out foggy, but the sun had come out, and the mist was beginning to burn off.

Several coast guard vessels were tied at the dock: Nehantic, two twenty-seven-foot RIBs, and a USCG Jet Ski. There was a storm at sea, and although the harbor waves were not large or dramatic, the hardware holding the floating docks creaked as they rose and fell on swells pushed in from far out in the ocean.

“Thanks for coming down,” Tom said, meeting Conor on the pier.

“Your office is a little nicer than mine,” Conor said, gesturing at the harbor and waterfront. Tom led him to a bench at the end of the dock, and they sat. One of the cross-Sound ferries passed by; the high-speed Block Island ferry was just loading up with passengers.

“So what’s up?” Conor asked.

“Did Matt Hendricks give you a call?” Tom asked.

“Yes, about the fuel line?” Conor asked.

“Yeah.”

“We talked,” Conor said. “Jen Miano’s lead on the Sallie B case, so she had a more extended conversation with him than I did. Our lab is working with him.”

“Anyway, here’s what I want to run by you,” Tom said. “Mermen.”

“You mean like mermaids?”

“Yeah but male.”

“Weird but okay. Why?”

“The little girl,” Tom said. “Gwen Benson. She’s started talking a bit. The first few days, nothing at all. But when I went to see her yesterday, she told me that her brother is alive.”

Conor bowed his head. When he raised it, Tom saw the compassion in his eyes. His brother knew without being told that Tom was torn up by not having been able to rescue Charlie.

“Wishful thinking?” Conor asked.

“I assume so,” Tom said. “But she said some things that I can’t get out of my mind.”

“Like what?”

Tom nodded. “She said that a boat had been following the Sallie B all the way from Hawthorne. She called it the ‘blackbird boat.’” He paused. “I asked her why that name, and she didn’t really say much.”

“Did her parents know whose it was?” Conor asked.

“She said they didn’t see it. Only she and Charlie did.”

“Where does the merman come in?”