The Edge, page 33
“Not only that, I’m pretty sure he killed Alberta, as well.”
With that statement Dak sat up in bed so fast he nearly ripped out a fluid line. “What!”
Devine gently pushed him back down and explained. “Your sister had an episode in front of Bertie just days before she was killed. Now, she had one of those episodes with me and one with Annie. And in the one with me and the event with Annie she was clearly fighting someone. I think she was fighting her attacker fifteen years ago. She didn’t say his name but Annie told me that Alex called the person a friend. But I think with Bertie Alex named her attacker. Bertie might have told someone and word got back to Bing. So he comes up here and takes care of that problem. And Alex’s rape kit disappeared from the department’s evidence room years ago. And Bing, as the chief, could easily have done that.”
“But isn’t there a statute of limitations on rape? And if you can’t prove he killed anyone, so what if the truth comes out about Alex? The law couldn’t touch him.”
“I did some quick research this morning after remembering something Alex told me.”
“What?”
“That she wasn’t sixteen yet when she was raped. Now in Maine, if the victim is under sixteen when the act occurs, there is no statute of limitation for rape. So Bing can still go to prison, for a long time, maybe the rest of his life.”
“My God,” said Dak, putting a hand to his face. “This is a nightmare.” He looked at Devine. “So what are you going to do?”
“Nail the guy.”
Dak looked terrified. “But, Devine, Alex could remember the truth any minute. And Bing knows that. And so if he did kill all those people, what’s one more?”
CHAPTER
72
AS DEVINE AND ALEX WERE driving back to Putnam through the rain Devine said, “I think I should come and stay with you, at least for a while.”
“Why?”
“It’s a big house, and with Dak not being there and all…” He didn’t want to come out and tell her that he believed her life was in danger, but Dak was right: Benjamin Bing had every incentive to kill her.
“Are you going to tell me what my brother and his friend were doing at that outbuilding when they were shot? And what were you doing there?”
“The source of the money your brother has been using to invest in the town? It’s not partners from Boston.”
“What, then?”
“He’s been dealing illegally.”
“Oh please God, not drugs.”
“No. In elvers.”
“In what?” she said, her brow furrowing.
“Glass eels, which are apparently worth a ton of money.”
“He’s been selling eels? You’re joking, right?”
“I take it you know nothing about the illicit eel trade?”
“I didn’t even know there was such a thing.”
“Well, it is a thing. And I’ve left it up to the local police to sort it out. But if I were a betting man, I don’t think Harper will give him too tough a time. Dak broke the law and I can’t condone that. But his intentions were good, mostly.”
“Do you think that’s why he was shot? Are there, I don’t know, rival gangs in the eel business?”
“No, I don’t think that was it.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know for sure, and until I do, I really don’t want to say.”
She sighed. “Well, thanks for telling me about Dak.”
“And what about me staying at Jocelyn Point?”
“If you want to, that’s fine.” She hesitated. “But I’m not sure we can… you know?”
He touched her arm. “That is not why I want to stay at Jocelyn Point. Your brother was just shot, and for all I know someone has a beef against your family. So I’d like to be close by in case they come back.”
“Do you really think someone is so mad at my family that they’d do that?”
“It’s amazing what people are capable of given the right motivation.” He paused and studied her. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”
She leaned away from him at this blunt segue. “No! Why?”
“I can teach you. I have a spare pistol.”
“No, I don’t want that. I hate guns.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay, but I want you to have something to defend yourself with.” He glanced at her. “As an artist and sculptress you must have excellent hand strength, as well as good hand-eye coordination and finger dexterity.”
“So? Do you want me to gouge an attacker in the eye with a paintbrush?”
“Not a paintbrush.” From under the sun visor he slipped out a knife in a leather sheath.
She looked at the weapon. “I don’t like—”
“You don’t have to like it, Alex. You just have to use it, if necessary.”
He pulled off the road, unsheathed the knife, and then made a straight stabbing motion with it. “Into the belly, two inches above the navel, up to the hilt.” At the end of the thrust he twisted the knife to the left and right, and then upward. “They won’t hurt you after that.”
“I can’t possibly—”
He sheathed the knife and made her take it. “You have no idea what you’re capable of until you need to be capable of it. You have one life, Alex—don’t let anyone take it away from you without a fight.”
He drove back to Jocelyn Point.
“Can I catch a few hours’ sleep here before I head out?” he said.
“Of course. I have some things to do around the house. You can sleep in my bed. It’s a lot cleaner than Dak’s.”
Three hours later his phone alarm went off. Devine rose and found Alex in the kitchen.
He said, “I’ve been invited to dinner tonight. I don’t like leaving you, I really don’t. But my instincts are telling me it’s important. Now, keep the knife with you at all times, lock all the doors, and do not go to your studio. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Anything looks or feels weird, and I mean anything, call the cops and then call me. I’ll be here in a flash.”
On his way back to the inn, Campbell phoned him.
“Benjamin Bing was in the Army for eleven years. Enlisted. Topped out an E6.”
“He was still a staff sergeant after eleven years?”
“His career plateaued. He was not going to move higher than that. Disciplinary problems. Hotheaded. Unmanageable. Those were some terms I found in his file.”
“Why’d he leave?”
“I had to dig deep to find it. He was stalking a woman who lived near the base where he was deployed. There were some communications, written, that went way, way over the line. There was also some vandalism at the woman’s apartment, and a man that she was seeing was attacked and severely beaten. But he couldn’t identify his attacker.”
“How young was the woman?”
“A freshman in college.”
“So the Army cut him loose to go stalking and beating up other boyfriends?”
“They didn’t want the headache. You know how that works.”
“So Mister Angry and Perverted comes back here to become police chief. Great. How’d he get the Purple?”
“He was shot in the ass. Seems to have been friendly fire. It was just a graze. He was in and out of the hospital in a day or two.”
“And he wears it for everyone to see, the son of a bitch. Anything else?”
“Yes, and it might be the most important. While an E6, he successfully completed the Army Sniper School course.”
“How the hell did a guy with his record and temperament qualify for Sniper School?”
“Apparently the dings on his record came after his acceptance there. And there’s something else.”
“What?” said Devine sharply.
“I found a recommendation letter in his file from a VIP. It might have helped carry the day on his acceptance into Sniper School.”
“Who from?” asked Devine, even though he had a pretty good idea.
“Then congressman and military hero Curtis Silkwell.”
“Okay,” said Devine.
“So what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to dinner.”
“Dinner?” said a surprised Campbell. “Where? And with whom?”
“With Françoise Guillaume. At the Bing mansion. At Françoise’s invitation.”
“Devine, you might be walking into a trap.”
“I’m sort of counting on it.”
CHAPTER
73
DEVINE PULLED OFF THE ROAD and sat there for a while in Earl Palmer’s truck with the engine running and the rain falling. He had a lot to think about, and this was as good a place as any to do so. The raindrops pitter-pattered on the roof in synchronicity with his cascading thoughts.
He knew that the Army Sniper School was a seven-week course at Fort Moore, formerly Fort Benning, where infantry and armor trained together at the Maneuver Center of Excellence. In going through the course Bing would have learned a number of critical skills, including fieldcraft application, concealed movement, target detection, sniper tactics, and, of course, advanced marksmanship. He’d had colleagues who had gone through it, and Devine had been impressed at the far better soldier that had come out the other end of the process. He had to take that into account when sizing up Bing as an opponent.
He also wondered if Bing was still in the area, if Devine was reading this whole thing right, that is. Despite all the “evidence” he had compiled, it was mostly circumstantial in nature, with a bit of conjecture and speculation thrown into the mix.
He texted Campbell to check on airline, train, and bus reservations to see if Bing had used one of those ways to get up here. He could have driven from Florida, but that was one long ride, pretty much the whole eastern seaboard.
However, a few things puzzled Devine, knowing what he now knew about Bing and his past training. Maybe events to come would shed light on them.
He drove to the inn and took a shower while the rain continued to pour down outside. Then he dressed in his last set of clean clothes and hurried out to the truck. As he got in, a car pulled up next to him. It was Chief Harper in a police cruiser.
Harper rolled down his window, and Devine leaned over and hand-rolled the passenger’s side window down.
“What’s up, Chief? You decide about Dak?”
“I’ve been up to talk to him at the hospital. I think we’ve worked things out.”
“I don’t think I want to ask how.”
“Thing is, it doesn’t seem fair how these elver fishing permits are handed out. They say by lottery, but who the hell really knows?”
“I can see that Dak’s argument won you over.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know that this town needs all the help it can get. But I want to know if you’re going to get involved in this because it might make me think differently if the federals will be looking over my shoulder.”
“Not my job. You can have Dak and the eels all to yourself.”
“Thank you for that. Now, where you heading out tonight?”
“I’ve been invited to dinner at the Bings.”
“Well, aren’t you lucky? I hear Françoise is really good in the kitchen. But did she give a reason for wanting to have you over?”
“Just said she wanted to talk.”
“You still up in arms about Chief Bing?”
“I haven’t ruled anyone out.”
“He’s in Florida.”
Devine decided not to volunteer the information about Bing being AWOL. “For all I know he’ll show up at dinner.”
“Well, if he does, tell him I said hello.”
“I will, unless he tries to kill me.”
Harper waved this off. “But I do think you’re right about something.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, everything you said. Hell, I even went over there myself and tried it. Well, to the extent I could. Not as easy as it looks. And I don’t have the physical problems he did. And then there were the knots you talked about and all.” Harper sighed. “I don’t see how Earl could’ve hung himself. I think you’re right.”
“Yeah, Annie Palmer agreed with me, too, after I laid out the evidence. Only Guillaume concluded that it was suicide despite all the contradictory evidence.”
“Well, sometimes the ME is wrong. I’ve seen that before.”
Wrong or just covering up, thought Devine. He said, “How about Earl not actually finding Jenny’s body? You ready to agree with me on that, too?”
“I’m not there but I’m still thinking. Now that I know someone killed him, it does give a motive. So, how’s Alex?”
“Hanging in there. I took her to see Dak. It went okay. She’s tougher than she knows.”
“If she could just remember who attacked her, it would save us a lot of trouble.”
“It’s not that simple, Chief.”
“I know, I know. Wishful thinking. Any luck on tracing the Norma rounds?”
“We know the manufacturer. We just don’t know how those rounds came to be up here.”
“Has to be the same person. Even with the NATO round shot at you. I mean, it’s all sniper stuff, right?”
Devine was about to agree, but then what he had thought about before came back to him.
But they weren’t all the same sniper stuff, were they? Am I wrong about it being Benjamin Bing? Or I am wrong thinking he’s the only one? If my theory is correct on how Earl was murdered, a second person is probably involved.
He came out of these musings and said, “After I convinced her that her grandfather was murdered, Annie Palmer gave me permission to search Earl’s cottage.”
Harper perked up at this. “Find anything?”
Devine told him about the video of Wilbur Kingman’s funeral service.
“Ben Bing was sitting right next to Earl. And he was talking to him about something. And Earl did not seem pleased.”
“He wasn’t pleased about anything that day,” retorted Harper. “The man he’d worked with every day for decades was dead! And—”
Devine cut in. “Did you know Bing was in the Army?”
“Sure, he didn’t hide his light under a bushel.”
“But did you also know he trained as a sniper in the Army?”
Harper flinched. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, now you do.”
A troubled-looking Harper said, “Um, well, you have a good night.” He added, “And please don’t get shot at, or kill anybody. I want to go to sleep at a decent time tonight and not wake up until morning.”
He rolled his window back up, and Devine started to do the same with his window. But he caught himself staring at the side panel of the police cruiser. A few moments later the cruiser pulled away, but not before Devine quickly took a picture of it with his phone.
On his phone he pulled up one of the satellite photos that Jenny Silkwell had obtained. The small pyramid shape that the satellite had captured had puzzled Devine to no end. But not anymore.
Unless he was much mistaken, Devine believed it was the end of the arrow point that the eagle was clutching in its claws—the symbol of the Putnam, Maine, police department.
The car that the Palmers saw driving away from where Alex had been attacked was a cop car.
And Devine was pretty sure he knew who had been driving it.
CHAPTER
74
THE GATES TO THE BING mansion opened as Devine approached them. He slid past in the old truck and geared down as he went up a slight rise to the house. He could hear the ocean roaring in the rear of the property as the tide pushed closer. He looked up and saw another cluster of black clouds heading in.
He parked and got out, and used a lull in the rain to make it to the front door without getting drenched.
Guillaume answered his knock. She wore a navy blue pantsuit with tiny white pinstripes, and a white open-collared blouse. She seemed cheery and relaxed, which put Devine even more on alert.
“I thought a place this big would have a butler,” he said.
She smiled at his quip. “We run a lean operation, but we do have a maid service three times a week and someone to look after the grounds. But I like to cook. However, if I don’t, we go out or just do leftovers.”
“‘We’? You mean you and Fred?”
“Yes. Please, come in.”
She led Devine through a spacious foyer into a substantial great room with ceilings that seemed nearly high enough for him to parachute from. A roaring fire blazed away in a fireplace nearly as tall as he was. The furnishings were unique enough to suggest they had been custom-built. There seemed to have been no expense spared in both building and furnishing the place.
Devine wondered why Guillaume’s father had bothered dropping so much money on such a grand residence in a place like Putnam, Maine.
Guillaume seemed to be reading his mind because she said, “He wanted to rub their faces in it, of course.”
Devine nodded. “Okay. And what do you think about that?”
“I wouldn’t have done it. But then I didn’t have a say in the matter. Would you like a drink? I opened a nice red.”
“I’m more partial to beer if you have it.”
She got their drinks and they settled into seats in front of the fire.
“Dinner won’t be long. It’s a crockpot stew. Hearty fare on a cold, rainy night.”
“Sounds good. Will Fred will be joining us?”
“He had some things to finish up. He should be here shortly.”
“He works hard, I take it.”
“Yes, he does. Running a small business is more than a full-time job.”
“But you juggle lots of balls, too.”
“I suppose it runs in the family.”
Okay, chitchat done. Let’s get to it, thought Devine. He wanted to get back to Alex as quickly as possible.
“You wanted to talk about something?” he said. “Insights?”
She lowered her wineglass and looked alarmed that her turn on the stage had come perhaps sooner than she had expected or wanted.
“Yes, that’s right,” she began.
