Chapter 58

SETH HOTCHKISS SPOKE UP. “I know what that place is,” he said, tapping his finger on the thermal image. “It’s an old boathouse. The main house burned down, I don’t know, maybe fifteen years ago, and they never rebuilt, so it was taken off your map, Sergeant. But the boathouse is still there. There’s a little creek that runs up to it, about right here.” He tapped the map again. “But it’s overgrown, and I don’t know whether it’s navigable.”

“Would the picnic boat make it up that creek?” Stone asked. “It only draws a foot and a half.”

“It wouldn’t be the depth that’s the problem,” Seth replied. “You’d have to make your way through a lot of brush.”

“Is there a way to the boathouse by road?” Sergeant Young asked.

“There’s an old gate about here on the main road,” Seth said, pointing to a place on the map. “There was a dirt track down to the boathouse-I delivered some sails there once-but that would be overgrown, too. You could make it through there in a four-by-four, I expect.”

“My Range Rover would do it,” Rawls said. “It’s got a lot of ground clearance.”

Young looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to get search warrants for the two buildings, and I’ll have trouble getting people over here before tomorrow morning, when the ferry starts running again.”

“Can you get a search warrant this time of night?”

“I can call a judge I know and send somebody over to his house with a warrant, then he can fax it to me here. But there’s still the matter of people.”

“We’ve got enough people right here,” Stone said.

“You’re not law enforcement.”

“You’ve got one cop, two ex-cops, a couple of federal agents, and a retired army NCO,” Stone said.

Ham flashed a badge. “It says here I’m a police lieutenant in Florida, even if I am a dollar-a-year man.”

“Deputize us,” Stone said. “We’re all armed, and we know how to handle it. We ought to go in there just before dawn, by land and by sea.”

“You want to try the creek with the picnic boat?” Young asked.

“Yes; we can always get out and walk if the going gets too rough.”

Young nodded.

“Wait a minute,” Holly said. “There’s not going to be anybody in the boathouse.”

“Why not?” Young asked.

“I don’t think anybody lives there. When I was using the computer, the only other light in the room seemed to be candles, and the computer was working on battery power. The place smells disused: no cooking odors, no cleaning fluids or furniture polish recently used.”

“She’s right,” Stone said. “We ought to go into Caleb Stone’s house first. The twins have left Nantucket; they might be back home.”

“I keep telling you, it’s not the twins,” Holly said. “It’s one man.”

“Maybe it’s both,” Stone said.

Young looked doubtful. “You think it’s credible for a father to conspire with his twin sons in a string of murders?”

“Maybe not, but it’s credible for a father to protect his sons, even from the law.”

“All right, this is what we’ll do,” Young said. “Stone, you and Dino and Seth take the picnic boat up the creek to the boathouse. Seth, I don’t want you going in there. You stay in the boat.”

“All right,” Seth said.

“Ham, Lance and I will go with Ed in the Range Rover, and the four of us will take the main residence.”

“What about me?” Holly said. “I’m going.”

“Holly, are you sure you’re up to this?”

“Try and stop me.”

“All right, you go in the boat with Stone and Dino.”

“Good.”

“Now, all of you listen to me: Nobody shoots anybody unless he’s shot at first or is about to be shot at. Is that perfectly clear? If any shooting happens there’ll be a very thorough inquiry, and each of us will be held responsible for any action outside the legal use of firearms.”

Everybody nodded.

“We’ll keep in touch by cell phone. We’ll set them to vibrate, and they’ll make less noise than radios. I want everybody to have loaded weapons and two spare magazines. I’ll have an assault rifle, in case we need more firepower, and I have a shotgun in my car.”

“So do I,” Rawls said.

“What I don’t have is more than one armored vest. I’m required by regulation to wear that, and the rest of you will be going in bare chested.”

“So to speak,” Holly said.

“And I don’t want anybody to get shot, so you must all use extreme caution. We may be up against three men, and we don’t know what kind of weapons, if any, they have. We’ll make simultaneous entry to both buildings, entering front and back.”

Seth spoke up. “There’s no back entrance to the boathouse, just stairs going up from the dock underneath.”

“Good. All right, everybody check your weapons and ammo,” Young said, looking at his watch. “We have a long day up here, and it gets light early. We should be in position by three-thirty a.m. In the meantime, get some rest, and we’ll leave here at three.”

Chapter 59

STONE, DINO, HOLLY AND SETH went out to the dock and got the picnic boat ready for departure. The skies had clouded up, and darkness was complete. Seth got the engine started, and the lights from the dashboard instruments and the GPS plotter offered a little light in the cockpit.

“Look,” Seth said, pointing to the plotter screen. “The creek is on the electronic chart; that will make it a piece of cake to find, even in the dark. All we have to worry about is moored boats and rocks, and I pretty much know where those are.”

“Let’s go,” Stone said. “It’s going to start to get light soon, and I want to at least be in position off the creek before that happens.”

Seth moved the boat away from the dock, and at idle speed they began moving up the inlet, away from the harbor. They could hear nothing, except the rumble of the engine. Seth increased power a little. “We could go faster, if we use the spotlight,” he said.

“As long as we can navigate safely in the dark, I’d rather not announce our presence,” Stone said.

Then, without warning, they heard the whine of a big outboard engine, and a Boston Whaler flashed past them, rocking their boat with its wake.

“Shit,” Seth said. “I didn’t hear that coming; he must have been doing twenty knots.”

“Was that Caleb’s boat?” Stone asked.

“Hard to tell with no light,” Seth replied. “Lots of Whalers hereabouts.” They continued their way up the inlet, passing moored boats along the way, making seven knots, according to the speedometer. “Creek up ahead,” Seth said. “One o’clock and a hundred yards.” He throttled back to idle.

HAM BARKER WATCHED from the rear seat as Ed Rawls’s Range Rover turned into Caleb Stone’s driveway.

“Lights off,” said Sergeant Young from the front passenger seat. “I don’t want ”em to know we’re here until they open the door.“

“BMW convertible dead ahead,” Rawls said.

“That’s the twins’ car,” Young replied. “They’re back from Nantucket.”

The car stopped, and Ham and Lance got out of the backseat.

“Lance,” Young said, “you and Ham go around to the back door and make sure your cell phone is on. What’s the number?”

Lance gave it to him, and he tapped it into his own phone and pressed the send button. Lance opened the phone. “I’m on the line,” he said.

“Good,” Young replied. “If you hear any kind of commotion or yelling, kick in the back door and come in with your weapons drawn. You’ve got a flashlight; use it if you have to.”

“Right,” Lance said, and he and Ham began to walk to the rear of the house.

Ham drew his Colt.45 auto, racked the slide and flipped the safety on with his thumb, then he took a small Surefire flashlight loaded with high-powered batteries from a holster on his gun belt. That light, he knew, was enough to nearly disable a man when it hit his face in the dark. Once, he had seen a soldier throw up after such an experience.