Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

After my enforced exile, I greedily took in every detail of the scene. There was a main street back of the harbor and a few smaller ones off those. We went about three blocks, pulling up in a parking lot before the courthouse annex, a long one-story building from the fifties with an overhanging flat roof. There were lots of pretty trees, shrubs and flowers planted in front. The sheriff shared the office space with the county’s Building and Planning Department, as well as the Public Health and Community Services.

Inside the front door was a cardboard box with a slit and a handwritten sign reading COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS, a large plastic recycling bin, and a set of gray metal lockers marked WEAPON DEPOSIT BOX. In my heightened and febrile state, they seemed to symbolize the essential trinity of American life: democracy, idealism, violence. We entered a warren of cramped offices where I was formally placed under arrest. My name and other details were recorded and my fingerprints taken. I was allowed one phone call, which I used to contact my parents. It was the middle of the night on the East Coast, but they were very sympathetic. My father told me that he couldn’t fly out immediately because my mother was too sick to be left alone, but that he would get in touch with people he knew in Boston and hire the best defense lawyer in the Northwest. They both said they loved me and that everything would be all right. I wanted to tell them about David, but it didn’t seem the right moment.

The deputy called Lorne had meanwhile broken out a first aid kit which he used to clean and dress the cut on my forehead. Then I was taken to a holding cell at the end of the block, a small bare space with a bunk bed and a window of opaque glass bricks. My handcuffs were finally removed and I was locked in. I paced up and down, thinking about David and Andrea. I wanted so much to see both again. Although it sounds absurd, I had come to think of us as a family. The intensity of the experiences we had been through together seemed to constitute a lived history at least as substantial as the one I had shared with Rachael. But time dragged by and no one appeared. Eventually I lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

I was awakened by the arrival of two different policemen. One pushed a breakfast tray into the room while the other covered his partner from the doorway with a revolver. Then they backed out of the cell and relocked the door. I got out of bed and retrieved the tray I was starving, and it was a good breakfast, biscuits and gravy and scrambled egg with a big mug of fresh coffee. After that, nothing happened for several hours. Then the door was unlocked again and the sheriff stepped inside, accompanied by the deputy named Pete.

“How’re you doin’?” the sheriff asked.

I shrugged.

“Best breakfast I’ve had in a long time.”

The sheriff nodded.

“Molly’ll never be the cook her mom was, but she does an OK job. We have to send out. Don’t have cooking facilities here. These cells are hardly ever used, except some drunk needs to dry out overnight.”

I’d had enough of this bantering.

“Where’s my son?” I demanded.

The sheriff leaned up against the wall.

“The boy and his mother are staying with Lorne and his wife. They’ve got plenty of room now the kids have gone. We got a doctor to attend to the woman’s injury. They’re both OK.”

I was about to point out that Andrea was not David’s mother, then decided to keep this to myself.

“I want to see him!” I said. “You have no right to do this. We’ve just been reunited and now you’ve separated us again!”

The sheriff held up his hand.

“You’re way ahead of me here. I don’t know a thing about you except your name. Assuming it is your name.”

I strode toward him, waving my hands dramatically.

“Call the FBI! David was kidnapped. They’ll tell you-”

“Hold it right there!”

The deputy had drawn his revolver and was pointing it at me. I stopped. There was a moment’s silence.

“OK,” said the sheriff. “How about we all go into my office, where a man can rest his butt, and you tell me the whole story from the beginning?”

My handcuffs were replaced and I was taken out of the cell and down the hall to a small cubicle with a desk decorated with framed family photographs. The sheriff sat opposite me, while Pete perched on a filing cabinet and operated the tape recorder. I told them everything, from the very beginning: how Sam and I had met at college, how I’d run into Vince by accident, how David had been kidnapped and Rachael had killed herself, how I’d sunk into depression and then decided to hit the road. I spoke openly and naturally, making no attempt to hide anything. I wanted them to realize that I had nothing to hide.

I must have talked for almost an hour. Sheriff Griffiths, as the sign on the desk proclaimed him to be, made no attempt to cross-question or interrupt. I finished by describing meeting Rick in Anacortes and the drive to the house.

“I don’t know where it is exactly, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find. It’s situated on a headland, down a dirt road. There are some outbuildings and a pier just like the one on the island.”

“What kind of a car were you driving?” asked Griffiths.

“A big old Chevy,” I replied promptly. “It has Minnesota plates, 469 AUK. It’s kind of an aquamarine color. There’s an antenna and whitewall tires.”

The sheriff glanced at the deputy.

“OK,” he said. “Now tell us what happened when you got to the island.”

I was about to answer, but something about the look the two policemen had exchanged made me think better of it. Filling in the background was one thing. My experiences on the island would form the basis of any case against me, and it might be a mistake to discuss that without legal representation. I could easily end up saying something which looked damaging. It didn’t help that most of the other witnesses were dead.

“I asked my father to get me a lawyer,” I told Griffiths. “I’d prefer not to say any more until he gets here.”

The sheriff nodded lazily.

“Guy phoned already,” he said. “Name of Merlowitz. Supposed to be here this afternoon. He’s chartering a floatplane from Seattle. Sounds like he must come expensive.”

He got to his feet with a sigh.

“I sure hope so, son. Because you’re going to need the best there is.”

“But I haven’t done anything!” I protested angrily. “My only crime was to be in the wrong place!”

The sheriff smiled very slightly.

“Not just you.”

“What do you mean?”

“That Chevy you just described to me? We found it OK. Only we didn’t find it at Fidalgo, like you said. It turned up on a dock in Bellingham, right next to the marina where that blue motorboat was stolen yesterday. The one that was faked up to look like a police launch.”

Back in my cell, I tried to come to terms with this latest development. It didn’t take long. I’d left the key to the Chevy with Lenny when I arrived. Mark and the others must have realized that the painted VW van was too conspicuous for their purposes and taken my car instead. It made no difference. Since I’d never left the island, I couldn’t be implicated in anything that might have happened in Bellingham.

The lawyer recommended by my father’s friends in Boston arrived shortly after three o’clock. He was in his mid-thirties, thin and balding, with a heavy five o’clock shadow and shrewd eyes. He wore a crumpled linen jacket, a white T-shirt with a silkscreened Gary Larson cartoon involving rats and lawyers, black jeans and Banfi loafers. He introduced himself as Paul Merlowitz, shook my hand and looked me in the eye.

“OK, first off, did you do it?”

“Of course not!”

Merlowitz continued to stare at me for a full ten seconds.

“If you didn’t do it, you didn’t do it,” he said in a studiously neutral tone. “Only it’s going to make it tougher.”

I was staggered. Here was the guy I’d been counting on to champion my innocence, presumably at vast expense, and he was making it pretty clear that even he wasn’t convinced of it.

“Tougher? How come?”

Merlowitz looked around my cell like a realtor sizing up the selling points of a property.

“Because if this comes to court we’re going to have to plead you not guilty, which means showing reasonable doubt. If we pled you guilty, we could go straight to mitigating circumstances, of which there look to be plenty. You haven’t any priors, and none of the police were hit. It was dark, you were confused. They’d probably let you cop a plea. Worse case, I could get you a short sentence in some tennis prison. Not guilty is a way tougher route to go.”

“Gee, I’m sorry, Mr. Merlowitz,” I retorted sarcastically. “What can I tell you? Next time I’ll make sure and pull that trigger.”

The lawyer smiled faintly.

“I’m just telling you what the deal is.”

Ten minutes later, we were all back in the sheriff’s office. It was an extremely tight squeeze, as Merlowitz commented caustically. Griffiths nodded.

“We’ve been asking for new facilities for near ten years now, but there, just isn’t enough crime in the islands. Maybe if this case attracts enough attention we’ll finally swing it.”

He looked at me.

“OK, son, we’ve had the back story. Now let’s hear what happened after you got here.”

I’d had plenty of time to organize the narrative in my mind, and I told it concisely and fluently. I gave my first impressions of the island and of the community living there, and how these had gradually changed. I mentioned the daily study sessions, and my discovery that the group believed that William Blake’s poetry was the Third Testament and Sam the second coming of Jesus Christ.

I talked about my attraction to Andrea, her account of Lisa’s death, and my son’s dramatically staged appearance on the rock. I went over the split between Mark and Sam and his attempts to win me over. Finally, I described the arrival of the fake police boat and the shoot-out which followed, and how Andrea and David and I had eluded the others and taken refuge in the woods.

The sheriff nodded.

“Well, that’s all very interesting. But what really concerns us here is what happened when we got to the island. And in that respect we’ve got a real problem believing what you say.”

“How come?”

Griffiths lay back in his chair, sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

“It’s like this. We still haven’t figured out exactly how many people were living there, and we haven’t accounted for all the ones who died yet. We’ve got a forensic team out there now, but it’s going to take a while. They’ve got to sift through every pound of ash and work out what’s cinder and what’s human bone, then add up all the bones and see how many complete cadavers we’ve got. We’re talking weeks, maybe months.

“In the meantime, here’s what we’ve got. When Lorne and Pete here and I reached the island, I made an announcement over the bullhorn telling everyone to drop their weapons. Then we started up the trail with the three guys from the fire department. When we reach the clearing where the camphouse used to be, someone opens fire with an automatic weapon. We hit the dirt and call for reinforcements. Soon as they get there, we secure the area and search the place. We find a girl with a broken leg and a woman and a man, both of them badly burned. The man has since died. None of them had an automatic weapon anywhere near them, or were in any shape to use it if they had.”

The sheriff stirred the papers on his desk with one hand, as though embarrassed.

“Soon as it got light, we searched the island from one end to the other. We used a helicopter, a K-9 team from Bellingham and a couple of boats to check the shoreline. We didn’t find anyone.”

“I fail to see the relevance of all this,” Merlowitz interrupted.

Sheriff Griffiths held up his hand.

“I was just coming to that, Mr. Merlowitz. You see, Sleight’s only a small island, and there’s nowhere to hide. So we can be sure that there’s no one still there we don’t know about. We can also be sure that no one left the island last night. I never heard of anyone swimming across those straits, least of all in the dark. Even if they had, they’d have been seen on Orcas. Everyone knows everyone around here, and any stranger’s going to get noticed. And the only boat on the island besides our own launches was riddled with holes and six feet under water.”

He looked at my lawyer, then at me.

“So at the time we came under fire, the only people on the island who weren’t dead or critically injured were you and the woman and child you claim were with you. And you had an automatic rifle.”

“I took it from Sam’s room so as to be able to defend me and my son. But I never fired it.”

Sheriff Griffiths raised a massive eyebrow.

“A bunch of bullets are gone from the clip.”

I suddenly remembered Sam blasting away at his bedroom wall. I was about to explain this to the sheriff when Paul Merlowitz told me not to answer any more question: He looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“We recovered some of the bullets that were fired at us,” the sheriff continued unperturbed. “Luckily the aim was high, kind of like you’d expect from someone without too much experience in using that particular kind of gun. A couple of the shells ended up embedded in the tree trunks. The ammo’s the same as what’s left in the weapon you discarded.”

“That doesn’t amount to conclusive proof,” Paul Merlowitz retorted. “My client has stated that there were a large number of such weapons on the premises. They probably bought the ammunition in bulk.”

The sheriff nodded.

“That’s possible. But there are also other possibilities.”

“Name one!” I snapped. “Just give me one good reason why I should have been involved in any of this!”

Sheriff Griffiths looked at me calmly.

“Well, let’s say this woman Andrea found out about your boy being kidnapped and felt bad about it. Let’s say she called you up in Minnesota and told you where he was. I could certainly understand if you decided to take revenge on the people who had seized your son and caused your wife’s death. That would explain why you three were the only ones to survive unscathed, plus a bunch of other things which don’t make a whole lot of sense right now.”

“That’s unsupported hypothesis!” said Merlowitz dismissively. “Your case against my client amounts to nothing more than a bunch of circumstantial details, none of which prove that he was anywhere near the scene when the shooting occurred, still less that he was responsible for it.”

“I was just outlining our thinking as of this time, Mr. Merlowitz,” the sheriff replied mildly. “Our investigation is continuing.”

I was taken back to my cell and locked up.

Long, low rolls of surf broke ceaselessly on the shore, collapsing into shallow sheets of water sweeping up the level beach, then draining away again, leaving the sand smooth and glistening. The sun stood high in a flawless blue sky, but a strong breeze kept the air cool.