Nine Read online

  Renzo held up a hand. “Not yet. First, tell us what he wanted here. Last night, ten thirty. Must have been important.”

  “Honestly, I can’t say.” Finch opened his hands, palms up. “He parked his car, walked up to the porch and we talked there. It took five minutes at the most.”

  “You didn’t let him in the house?”

  “No.”

  “Did he seem to know you?” Renzo leaned forward.

  “He knew my name.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How would he know your name?”

  Finch took a few seconds to consider this. Turino had mentioned Jeremiah Rickets. From what Finch remembered about J.R., the last thing he would need is a police investigation. He decided not to answer the question directly. Instead, he’d try a slight diversion. “Look, I told him I had company” — he tipped his head toward Eve — “and told him to come back this morning if he wanted to talk. I advised him to drop in at the resort, that they’d likely have a room open. Do you know if he checked in there?”

  Renzo drew a breath and glanced at Vanier. The gesture told Finch that the pressure had diminished. Slightly. “Yeah,” Renzo allowed. “Last night, just before eleven.”

  “Okay. So, that’s good.” Finch plopped his hands on his knees and smiled. But the smile was a bluff. He knew instinctively that something horrible had happened. Still, he pressed on with the ruse. “And when you talked to him, what did he say?”

  “Notting.” Vanier shook his head. “He was found dis morning on the rocks at the end of Bennett Bay Park.”

  Eve felt her stomach sinking. “He’s dead?”

  “Yes,” Renzo said.

  “What happened?”

  “The coroner’s flying in from Victoria this morning. We’ll know more later this week.”

  “Does it look suspicious?” Finch asked.

  Renzo’s face took on a stony expression. “Like I said, we’ll know more later this week. Let me ask you, do you have any plans to return to California?”

  Eve pursed her lips and blew a whiff of air toward Finch. “Yes. I’ve got a job. I’ve just taken a few days off to visit.”

  “And you, Mr. Finch?”

  “Once she goes, I’ll drive back.”

  “All right.” Renzo drew two business cards from his briefcase and passed them to Eve and Finch. “Can I ask you to contact me before you leave?”

  “Of course.” Finch nodded and smiled at Eve. Until now, he hadn’t planned his return to San Francisco. But circumstances change, and now they pointed out a new direction.

  ※

  They waited until four o’clock, about an hour before dusk, Finch figured. Since it was a Sunday, and the world had slipped back an hour to standard time — and because it would take Renzo and Vanier at least two hours by ferry to make their way back to the local RCMP station on Salt Spring Island — Finch assumed that the police and coroner had already wrapped up the physical investigation of Turino’s death at the end of Bennett Point. Still, he preferred to be cautious, and took the long way around to the park. He drove along Wilkes Road to Isabella, turned left and cruised down the narrow track until he reached the end of the turn-around.

  “No cop cars,” he said to Eve.

  “In fact, no cars at all.” Once again she was struck by the stark wilderness surrounding her. How could a place so beautiful remain so empty?

  “We’ll see if they parked at the resort.”

  He retraced his route and five minutes later pulled his RAV4 into the gravel parking lot of the Mayne Island Resort.

  “There’s only five cars here.”

  “Including Tony Turino’s.” He glanced at the California plates, the Warriors bumper sticker. “I guess they can’t get a tow service in here until tomorrow.”

  “Interesting. No crime scene tape on the car.”

  “And no sign of the RCMP. Could be they’d cleared this one off their books already.” Finch smiled and cut the ignition. “Let’s take a walk. It’s a beautiful evening for it. You’ll see why they made this place a national park.”

  After walking a hundred yards along the chip trail, Eve realized that she’d entered a kind of paradise. The tops of the fir trees shimmered in the high wind above them, whispering in the air as they moved. In the dusk, the lamps from a few distant cottages dotted the far side of the cove. Beneath them, the waves washed against the rocks and the tide pushed the ocean onto the shore where a few gulls battled over some oyster shells that had been raked up by the shifting water. The total effect mesmerized her and she continued along the path as if she’d been bewitched.

  When they reached the end of the trail, they noticed a band of black-and-yellow crime scene tape stretched across the hundred-odd feet of ground that marked the end of Bennett Point.

  “So this is where they found Turino?” She pointed to the far side of the tape, down to the massive rocks where Turino’s corpse must have fallen.

  “Looks like it.” Finch studied the surrounding rocks and trees. “I imagine the police and coroner removed the body and any other physical evidence. No surprise, really. Way out here, they don’t have the resources to babysit a crime scene overnight.”

  Both of them considered the end of the trail, the ocean slapping against the rocks below, the surrounding trees and broken limbs that had fallen in a recent storm. In the distance they spotted a freighter from Seattle or Vancouver heading west through the Juan de Fuca Strait and likely bound for China.

  “It’s a pretty spot, isn’t it?” Finch slipped his hands into his vest pockets.

  “Yeah. Unbelievable.” Eve sat on the wood bench overlooking the narrow channel between the point and a small uninhabited island that stood just offshore. The water flooded through the gap in a steady rush that generated a shallow whirlpool twenty feet away from the point. “I suppose if you had to choose, this might be where you’d want to end it.”

  “What? You still think he killed himself?”

  They’d already debated — and discounted — the possibility of Turino’s suicide. Why would anyone take the trouble to travel a thousand miles to track down Finch, arrange a breakfast meeting, check into a hotel — and then off himself?

  “No. I’m just saying. Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to a suicide.”

  “True enough.” Finch considered the dozens of suicides inspired by Kali Rood’s insane ideology. Two years ago, they’d witnessed that kind of madness in person. He settled beside Eve on the bench and they sat in silence for a few minutes. Then something caught his eye. A few feet to their left, the trunk from an uprooted fir tree formed a long bench-like arm that pointed to the far side of the cove. He stood up and walked to a white square of paper. A matchbook, with the word “Shotwell's” stamped on the cover, lay beneath a dead branch extending from the uprooted tree trunk.

  “Look at this.” His knees cracked as he bent down to get a better look. “From Shotwell's.”

  She leaned over him and let out an amused chuckle. “Isn’t that a saloon down in the Mission District?”

  “Yeah.” Finch lifted the matchbook cover with a fingernail. He could barely make out an address on the cover. “3349 20th Street.”

  “Just a sec. Don’t touch it.” She drew a latex glove and baggie from her purse, slipped the glove over her right hand and nudged Finch out of her way.

  He laughed and let her take the lead. “You brought that gear all the way up here? On your vacation?”

  “Once a cop, always a cop.” She opened the cover to reveal five or six paper matches still bound to the stub. “Hey, look at this.” On the inside flap someone had written a phone number.

  “415 area code,” Finch said. “San Fran. There’s a chance this belonged to Turino.”

  “A good chance. And these might have been his last two smokes.” She pointed to the cigarette butts at their feet. She picked them up and examined the brand below the filters. “Camel.”

  Finch looked into the distance as h
e considered this. “Last night Turino was smoking when he got to the house.”

  “So?”

  “Before he left he stamped out the butt in the driveway.”

  Eve smiled. “So we bag these” — she dropped the two Camel stubs and the matchbook into her baggie — “and compare them to what’s back at your place.”

  “Which tells us what?”

  “That he smoked his last two cigarettes right here. Before somebody killed him.”

  Finch shook his head with a look of doubt. “Or he shared his last smoke with someone he thought he could trust.”

  Eve blinked. She hadn’t considered this possibility. “Maybe.” She tipped her jaw to one side. “So, okay. Maybe that.”

  “I’m trying to remember exactly what Tony said to me.” Finch gazed across the channel at the whitecaps cresting the distant waves. “Something like, ‘There's trouble coming at us. All of us.’ As if it included me.”

  They looked at one another. Their eyes locked together as a rising awareness struck them.

  “You know what that means?” he said.

  Her eyes swept over the ground as if she was searching for something new. When she found nothing, she glanced at her watch. “Yeah.” A bleak look crossed her face. “Unless he took the last ferry back to the mainland, Turino’s killer is probably still here on the island.”

  Finch held a hand to his mouth as he pondered the implications. “In which case, he might come by for a visit, too. Maybe tonight.”

  ※

  It took Finch less than a minute to scratch through the gravel at the foot of the porch staircase to uncover Turino's cigarette butt. “Looks like the same brand.”

  “Let me see.” Eve snapped the glove over her right hand again and carefully lifted the filter. She turned it in her fingers and let it slide into her palm.

  “That's it. Camel.” Finch brushed the dust from his fingers. “Put it into the baggie with the others and let's get them into a lab.”

  Eve shook her head. “Not so fast. We don't want any cross contamination. If we run a DNA match we want to determine if the DNA tags on this cigarette match at least one of the two traces we found in the park. If all three show the same ID, it can only mean one thing. Turino — and Turino only — smoked all three cigarettes.”

  She dropped the butt from the driveway into a second bag and sealed it.

  “But if only one of the two in the park match this one,” Finch continued, “it will prove that Turino enjoyed his last few minutes with a companion.”

  “Right. Someone who enjoyed Turino’s company so much that he killed him.”

  They entered the cabin and Eve pulled a permanent marker pen from her purse and marked a location, date and time on the plastic seal of each baggie. Then she set them side-by-side and took a photograph of the evidence.

  “Now what?” Finch asked.

  “I'll take them back to San Fransisco and ask Leanne Spratz to run a DNA and print analysis for me.”

  “You’re still calling in favors from her? After what? Three years?”

  “Hey, you’re not the only one who loves me.”

  He laughed at that, then Eve, more serious now, held a hand to her mouth. “So who do you think killed him?”

  “I don't know. Turino said something about the 9th Engineer Battalion and J.R.” He looked away. “I guess he knew him.”

  “Who's J.R?”

  “A sergeant in the 49th Military Police Brigade stationed in Baghdad. Around oh-three, the same time I was there. A few years later, when I started out as a reporter at The Post, he helped me break open a huge story.”

  “That one about the serial killer? The five knives guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what about the 9th?”

  “I never knew anyone in the 9th Engineer Battalion. Apparently that was Turino’s unit in Iraq. But it means nothing to me.” He looked into the distance as if he might identify something he could recognize from the past. “I can ask J.R. when we get back.” He shrugged. “Damn it. It’s been over ten years since I last talked to the guy. Could be hard to track him down.”

  “So until then, we do what?”

  His first instinct was to get her to the ferry landing. She could park her car on the dock, lock the doors and sleep through the night as she waited for the morning ferry. But then she'd be on her own, perhaps even more vulnerable than if she stayed here. Besides, he knew she'd object to any option that separated them.

  “Tomorrow you get on the first boat and drive home. As soon as you go, I'll close up the house for the winter and head back to San Fran. Should take me two days if I go flat out.” He considered the drive ahead. Just under a thousand miles due south down the I-5. Years ago he would’ve relished the journey. No more. “And I'll call the RCMP and update them, like they asked.”

  “I doubt they'll release the coroner's report by then.”

  “They might if they determine that Turino's death was from natural causes. Who knows, they could decide that he slipped and fell onto the rocks. Especially if he'd been drinking. He looked the type.” Finch shrugged off the notion. Death by misadventure. “He wouldn't be the first. Far from it.”

  Eve opened the front door, stepped over to the porch staircase, plunked herself down on the second step, and wedged her heels into the gravel. The dusk gathered around them and she could barely make out the road below the driveway. She realized how much sooner the night had descended on them compared to evenings in the Bay Area.

  “Jeez, it gets dark fast here.”

  Finch sat beside her. “You know, this guy from the 9th. If he killed Turino and he's still here, we have to prepare for him.”

  “Yeah. Whoever he is,” she added. “We don't even know his name.”

  He rubbed both hands over his face with a weary sigh. “No. I guess we don’t.”

  “Nine.”

  “What?”

  “I'm calling him Nine. After the Ninth Battalion.” She set her elbows on her knees and bridged her fingers together. “And it would help if we knew if he had a weapon. Or not.”

  He shook his head with a bleak expression. Beyond the kitchen knives, the wood ax and kindling hatchet, he had nothing to defend them. “If he comes for us, it'll be tonight. Our one advantage is knowledge of the terrain.”

  She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “If he comes through the door” — he pointed over his shoulder with a thumb — “with a gun in his hand, then it's game over. Nobody would even hear the shots. But if we can take him on outdoors, we can set him up.”

  “You mean here on the driveway?” Her voice rose and ended with a skeptical laugh.

  “Yeah, to start with. Then I’ll lead him on a run down to the road, onto the beach and along the shore. Once I cross the road, I'll give a shout, then you follow him. Remember that kid's game — monkey in the middle? Try to spook him. Make some noise, throw some rocks.” The more Finch thought about it, the more convinced he became that they could mount some kind of defense.

  “Whoa, cowboy. Shouldn’t we call the cops first?” Eve held up a hand as if she trying to stop a traffic collision. “Renzo and Vanier would want to know about this.”

  Finch ran a hand over his face. “We could. But there’s no way they can get back to the island before morning. Even if they had a helicopter. Which they don’t.”

  “What about the ferry? There must be some kind of emergency service.”

  “The last ferry left hours ago.” He coughed up a dreary laugh. “The fact is, until we get on the morning ferry, we’re on our own, Eve.”

  She studied the gravel driveway, the way it disappeared into the gathering night.

  “It's a new moon tonight, Eve. We'll be in complete darkness.” As he considered the options, a new thought struck him. “And tonight there's a king tide.”

  “A what?”

  “When the tides and currents align with the moon phase. It happens a few times a year. Including
tonight.”

  “How does the tide help?”

  “You saw the current running between Bennett Point and that small island.” He raised his arm toward the distant cove. “When there's enough momentum, it creates whirlpools. Some of the locals told me that during king tides, a vortex can show up anywhere. If I can get this guy in the water it may be all the help we need.”

  The more he talked, the more convinced Eve became that it was worth a shot. She helped him gather some rope and a spool of wire from the shed behind the house. Then she grabbed some empty tin cans from the garbage pail and helped him to attach the cans to the thin strand of wire. Working with two flashlights, she held one end of the line across the driveway while Finch fastened the other end to a two-foot length of rebar that he drove into the ground with the blunt end of the hatchet. Then he attached her end of wire to a second piece of rebar and pounded it into the long grass on the opposite side of the driveway.

  When he felt satisfied, Finch brushed his foot against the line. The cans rattled and fell mute. Not very loud, but they both knew it would be enough to alert them to an approaching stranger. To Nine.

  With the alarm set, Finch piled two heaps of stones in the grass. One mound about twenty feet past the trip wire. The second stood another ten feet from the road. Then he slung a coiled rope over his shoulder, lifted the wood hatchet in his left hand and led her down to the beach and along the shore.

  “All right.” He stopped at the water’s edge and pointed his flashlight beam at their feet. “Let's set this up along the cliff. Somewhere above the tideline.”

  “And then?”

  “Back to the cabin. We’ll need to eat some carbs and protein. Drink lots of water. Maybe get some sleep.”

  ※

  They didn’t have to wait long. By ten o’clock they’d finished eating. Then they set to work packing Finch’s belongings into his suitcases. His books and manuscript papers went into two cardboard boxes that he’d used to carry groceries from the general store. She figured it would take about an hour to stow all of his gear in his car and set the cabin in order. Their Plan B was simple: if Nine failed to appear over the next eight hours, they’d lock up the cabin and drive both cars to the ferry first thing in the morning. Once they were underway, Finch would call Annette Shatley, thank her for her hospitality, and advise her that he’d locked up the cottage and decided to head back to the US a few weeks early. Then he’d make a second call to the RCMP office on Salt Spring Island and tell Renzo and Vanier that, just as he’d promised, he and Eve were now moving on. But then everything changed.