The Darkest Place Read online

  Of course everything Miller said was a lie. He never took walks on this beach, or any beach, for that matter. Walking on sand was particularly hard on his bad knee. And he hated the cold, despised winter. He spent his evenings thinking of summer nights, the ones past and the ones to come—open windows and swelling curtains, crickets chirping, the sound of cars on Hill Street. He craved all that. But Miller wasn’t really worried about being found out. He wasn’t worried that any of the early suspicions the cops had about him would lead to anything serious. He had spent all day working at his tiny shop on Main Street. Regulars had come and gone at the rate of five or six each hour, had seen him, spoken to him, handed him their money. After work he had gone for drinks at Barrister’s, and plenty of people had seen him there, seen him leave with Abby. Then of course there was Abby to back up what he had done with his time after that, and the cop watching the perimeter who had seen Miller drive up just moments before. No, he wasn’t worried about this going too far. He was covered. And, besides all that, he was the son of a cop, had grown up in the presence of cops. He could read one of them better than he could read anyone. He had already seen in Spadaro’s body language the exact instant when hope of a lucky break fled from the man.

  Soon enough Spadaro ran out of questions. Or maybe it had become clear to him that Miller wasn’t going to run out of answers. He left Miller at the car, under the watch of another cop, and went to confer with his colleagues standing near the water’s edge. Miller waited, listening to the conversations around him, to the squawk of the radio. He listened for anything that would tell him more than what he had seen. But he heard nothing. His face was numb now, and he knew that the inside of the car by which he was standing would be warm, that relief from this brutal cold was so close. But he tried not to think too much about that. He imagined instead the nights he craved, those bouts of humidity that come and stay around for a few days in August, hanging heavy over the town, unaffected even by the ocean breezes. He wondered if Abby would be around next summer, if she would still be in his life, coming to see him after work and lying beside him, her skin silky and cool. He imagined beads of sweat collected on the bridge of her small nose, and how her hair, after a late night shower she had taken to cool off, would smell spread across his clean pillowcase.

  Another car pulled into the lot then, its headlights swinging toward Miller. He turned his head so he could not be recognized. When the light passed, he looked and saw that this car was an unmarked sedan, the same make and year as the patrol cars. Roffman, the new chief of police, was arriving on the scene. Miller watched as the car came to a stop and Roffman climbed out from the passenger seat. A man of average build, Roffman was in his midforties. At first glance, there was nothing very distinctive about him, nothing threatening or, for that matter, inviting. Miller’s father would have summed Roffman up in one word: administrator. But Miller knew better, knew the man to be more than he appeared to be. Roffman was a politician first, good and getting better every year, and a cop second. Compassionate human being was somewhere much farther down that list.

  Another cop climbed out of the sedan. A woman, from behind the wheel. Miller knew her. Her name was Barton, and she had been the last cop hired by Miller’s father, back when the man was under investigation by the FBI and trying to give his department at least the appearance of being something less than corrupt. But her appearance here now was too little, too late. Miller’s chances of learning anything more had disappeared the moment Roffman arrived.

  Spadaro hurried up from the beach to meet Roffman. He must have seen the headlights. At first it looked like Spadaro was going to be successful in leading the chief past Miller, which was clearly his intention. It wouldn’t be good—for anyone—for the chief to see Miller. But Roffman spotted him just as he reached the end of the parking lot. He stopped short, fifteen feet from Miller, regarding him the way he might regard a stray dog that had wandered into his yard with the intention of digging a hole.

  “Christ. What is he doing here?” Roffman said.

  Spadaro answered that Miller had walked into the crime scene from somewhere down the beach—or at least Spadaro started to say that. Roffman cut him off mid-sentence.

  “Get him out of here. If he shows his face again, arrest him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This isn’t amateur night.” This wasn’t said to Spadaro but to Miller. Roffman waited a moment more, staring at Miller, then finally turned, sharply, and continued toward the shore. To say anything else would have been to give Miller more attention than he deserved, the exact kind of attention the kid desired. He was just a wannabe, a busybody, and Roffman wasn’t worried about him. There were plenty of ways to handle him if he got out of hand. His past could revisit him. All it would take was an accusation, or the threat of one. The kid would crumble, run. But that fuck the kid worked for sometimes, he was a different story. He was a problem, something to worry about, especially now that a family had hired him. If it came to it, Roffman would send him a message by locking up his little scout, kill two birds with one stone. If it came to it, which it looked now like it had.

  Roffman reached the beach and started down it. Barton was following behind, but Spadaro stopped her.

  “Take Miller to his car and make sure he leaves the area,” he said. “If he doesn’t go or tries to come back, cuff him and take him in. Understand?”

  Spadaro hurried after Roffman then. He didn’t look back at Miller. Together, the two men headed down the beach. The cops waiting at the water’s edge all turned to face them. The floodlight came on again, aimed at the sand, a circle of light as white as a summer moon.

  Barton led Miller to the unmarked sedan. He didn’t make her say anything to him. He’d pushed his luck as far as it would go. They reached the car and got in, Miller in the back seat, like a criminal. But he didn’t care. The warmth. Barton sat behind the wheel. Miller told her where his truck was, and she started toward it, passing a few hundred feet later the cop’s standing point on Cemetery Road. She made the turn onto Old Point Road and parked at the curb, bumper-to-bumper with Miller’s pickup. She yanked the column shifter up and turned her head to look at Miller through the cage that separated the back seat from the front. She spoke over her shoulder to him.

  “You working?” she said. “Or has this just become a habit of yours?”

  “I was just out for a walk.”

  Barton smiled. She was twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight, Miller wasn’t sure. She certainly wasn’t over thirty. She was tall, fair-skinned, slight even in her cold-weather jacket. Miller couldn’t recall ever seeing her outside the company of Roffman. She was his driver whenever he left Village Hall on business, and at the end of the day, when it was time to go home. During the day, while in the office, she was his assistant, rarely pulling any other duty. There were rumors about the exact nature of their relationship, but Miller wrote most of those off as nothing more than the griping that usually occurs whenever a woman is brought into what has for too long been a boys’ club. Still, Barton was attractive, had a natural beauty, didn’t wear a lot of makeup, didn’t try to call attention to herself, not that she needed to. Her hair was brown and straight, done up in a bun when she was in uniform but down the one time Miller had seen her in civilian clothes. If there was anything more to Barton’s relationship with the chief, Miller knew he couldn’t really blame the man, though maybe she had some explaining to do. Barton had a smile that was quick and warm, even when she was using it to let you know that she knew full well that you were lying, like now. Few men could resist a killer smile.

  “You’re out here for that friend of yours, aren’t you?” Barton said.

  Miller didn’t answer. Instead, he asked, “Is it a man or a woman out there floating in the bay?” It was what he had come out into the cold to learn.

  “Tommy,” she half-scolded. She had always treated Miller in a sisterly kind of way. She had stood beside him at his father’s funeral five years ago. She’d only been on
the force for a few months then but had already become like family. Two years after that she’d stood beside him again, when his mother was buried. In the years that followed there really hadn’t been a day when Miller didn’t think of her. And there hadn’t been a week when she didn’t call to check up on him.

  “Just tell me, Kay.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “It’s a man, isn’t it?”

  “You should go home. I mean it.”

  “I just need to know.”

  “So you can impress your friend?”

  Miller nodded.

  “Then he isn’t really your friend, is he?”

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you’ve heard about him. He’s not what a lot of people think.”

  Barton waited a moment, watching him. “So what is it with you two anyway? I mean, the real story.”

  Miller ignored the question. “It’s a young guy back there. Isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They called the chief on the phone and told him. They didn’t want it going out over the radio.”

  “No, I meant how do they know. The body is a pretty good distance from the shore. Facedown, from what I can tell.”

  “There was a phone tip. An anonymous woman. She said there was the body of a young man floating in Shinnecock Bay. Units went looking and spotted it.”

  “That’s weird. I mean, how did she know it was a young man if it’s offshore?”

  “That’s what I was wondering, too.”

  “Were there phone tips before? For the other two?”

  Barton shook her head, but he knew she was refusing his question, not answering it.

  “That’s all I can do for you, Tommy. Anyway, you’re going to want to stay out of this. Roffman is under a lot of pressure. The mayor, too. There are people who don’t want this to get out, who are afraid tourists will think twice about coming out here if they’re worried about ending up facedown in a bay. Do yourself a favor, okay? Stay out of this.”

  Miller reached for the door handle. He needed to call this in, needed to do that now. “Thanks for the tip. And for the advice.” He yanked at the handle but the door was locked. There was no way to unlock it from the back seat. He looked at Barton through the metal screen. She was still looking over her shoulder at him. He looked at the side of her face.

  “I mean it, Tom. Stay clear of this. Tell your friend, too. This is serious business.”

  “We’ve always thought so. Let me out now, Kay.”

  “Don’t like being locked up?”

  “Not really.”

  She nodded and pressed a button in the console in her door. The back door unlocked.

  “See you, Tommy.”

  “I’ll see you, Kay.”

  Miller swung the door open and got out, hurrying to his truck. He climbed behind the wheel and started the engine for the heat. Barton made a U-turn, then stopped, the sedan standing alongside Miller’s truck. Miller waved to her. She nodded, then drove off.

  He dug his cell phone from the pocket of his field jacket and punched in a number, then waited. It was late, but there was nothing he could do about that. Three rings, and then a female voice, low and breathy, the accent French. It was hard for him to tell if he had awakened her; she always sounded a little dreamy, a little far away.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s Miller. Is he there?”

  The female voice said, “One moment,” then disappeared. A few seconds later Miller was listening to a male voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “They found another body,” Miller said.

  “We heard.”

  “It’s the same as before, pretty much. Except this one didn’t just wash up. They found it because some woman called in an anonymous tip.”

  There was a pause, then: “You’re certain about this?”

  “Yeah. What do you want me to do from here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I can help.”

  “Don’t need it.”

  “I know the family has hired you to find their kid. I’m trying to be a good citizen here. I didn’t have to tell you any of this.”

  “Call Reggie tomorrow. He’ll give you the usual hundred bucks.”

  “I don’t want snitch money. I want to help you guys.”

  “If you want to help, do what you can to lose my number. Understand?”

  The line went dead. Miller closed his cell phone and looked out his window. Through the bare trees he could see the bay, a dark void in the expanse of dark night. The Long Island horizon was low, just so much sky over so much water. Beyond the bay was a narrow strip of land. Dune Road. It separated the bay from the Atlantic. Fantastic homes were found there, and secluded beaches. Why not toss the body into the sea? Miller thought. At the right time, it would be carried far away, wash up somewhere else, if at all. The two bodies before this one were also found in bays. Why?

  Miller stared at the string of greenish lights that ran the length of Dune Road. Streetlights, but from where he sat, a long bracelet of pale emeralds spread out unevenly against a soulless black. A thing of beauty, thin, frail, not much really against so much dark. The only sign of life, aside from the cops back at the shore’s edge, and Miller’s own breathing.

  Now he thought of the girl waiting for him in his bed. Her warmth, her smells, her breath. There was nothing more he could do here, nothing more that could be done tonight. So he started back toward home, vents blowing heat against his legs, as he drove rehearsing in his head what he would say and what he would not say.

  A late moon was rising in the northeast, in the sky over town, cresting the long line of trees. It added very little light to the night.

  Two

  DEACON KANE DRIFTED TOWARD CONSCIOUSNESS, OR WHAT passed for it, at eight in the morning. He had arrived at Meg’s bayside house the evening before, after dark, just to be safe, and they had gone through two bottles of Merlot and then some vodka before falling into bed together sometime around midnight. An hour or so later, drunk and exhausted, Meg slipped into a deep sleep beside Kane. He remained awake, however, listening to the wind pressing against the long windows of her home and feeling the alcohol rush frantically through his bloodstream. He eventually gave up altogether on the idea of sleep and sat up in the dark, moving to the edge of the mattress so he could look out the window nearest to the bed. Meg and he only slept together in a small room at the front of the house, never in the bedroom at the back, the bedroom Meg shared with her husband. The reasons for that were obvious to Kane.

  A hundred feet below the bluff on which the house stood lay Great Peconic Bay, and Kane had no choice when he couldn’t sleep but to sit and stare at it. Sleeplessness as such wasn’t at all uncommon for him; it plagued him often enough both here and back at his dingy two-room apartment in town. But at least when he was here, when Meg reached her limit and passed out beside him, he had something to study other than an empty parking lot—the view outside his own bedroom window—as he let his mind drift toward his grief. He was never all that far from it anyway. It might have been better if he’d had a different view outside her window, anything but water, but there was nothing he could do about that. So he had sat there for a while, silent in the dark, watching the late moon rise in the northeast, grieving.

  Kane had eventually climbed in beside Meg again. Her breath was both sweet and foul. It and the wind outside was all he could hear. Gradually he found sleep. This took awhile, though, coming finally out of nowhere. When he awoke again, his head aching, he was alone in the bed. It was morning, and the five tall windows that ran the length of the room let in the bright morning. The comforter that covered Meg’s bed was white, as were the walls and ceiling, all flawless white. The floors were highly polished pine. The light from outside seemed to almost echo around the bare room like a harsh noise.

  Kane rose slowly. He was thirty-five, certainly not a kid anymore. But he felt ol
d. His lower back ached. The mattress was too soft, but you take what you can get. The only exercise he got lately was fucking Meg, and though that wasn’t without its demands, it wasn’t enough to keep him from feeling that he was growing weaker and weaker in this exile of his. What he had thought would be a few months of wandering had somehow become two years—two years—with nothing much to show for it but an attachment to a woman he could never have, and ever-increasing debt. He hadn’t written a word since he started teaching, hadn’t thought much of anything but his need for Meg and everything he’d lost.

  He found his jeans and sweater and pulled them on. The morning sun did nothing at all to warm the room. It was as cold now as it had been during his dark vigil. Kane stood, felt the floorboards beneath his feet. His shoes and socks were elsewhere, but where exactly he wasn’t sure. The house was an old cottage that had over the years been built onto, the latest addition having been made some fifty years ago. Drafts could be felt coming off the windows and, in some places, through the walls. The place, covered in dark, weathered cedar shingles, looked sturdy enough from outside. Kane never would have expected such chill could be found inside a bayside house like this. They were all, he had imagined, as tight as ships. And it was worth, what, millions? But then this unusual and sudden cold seemed to have the ability to find its way to wherever it wanted to be, find its way in and stay.

  Kane paused to look out his window once more. It was his window now, or so he felt. You spend hours alone with something in the dark and it becomes yours. This window, Meg, his grief. The bay reflected the overcast sky, its gray surface looking like ice. But Kane knew it wasn’t frozen over. Every morning, in the time he’d been coming here whenever Meg’s husband was out of town, the old man who lived next door made his way down from his back porch to the beach below. There he’d rush into the water—fall and spring, summer and winter. The old man was lean and tall, balding, with silver hair and beard, and he took his morning dip without fail, as far as Kane could tell. The last few days, despite this arctic cold, the old man held to his routine. And this morning, not at all to Kane’s surprise, the old man was out again.