“You think he left another calling card?” the chief now asks.
“Yes, sir. Unless he's changed that part of his M.O., too.”
“Mook was upstairs,” I say.
“Come again?” Ceepak says.
“Who the hell is Mook?” The chief is a step or two behind.
“Mook did this.” I have everybody's attention now. “Him and his friends. He was upstairs at the coffee shop. He has a buddy who's ex-army with a white minivan. A sharpshooter.”
The chief jams his hands against his hips. “How do you-?”
“Last night,” I interrupt the chief. I'm probably not supposed to do that but I'm new on the job. “I ran into Harley Mook at the diner. He's someone I know. He said his friend was a better shot than Ceepak. Mr. Mook also gave some indication he was jealous about the nature of my relationship with Ms. Landry.” I'm trying my best to say it like Ceepak would say it.
“Where did you see him, Danny?” Ceepak asks. “Where was he this morning?”
“Sun Coast Coffee. Upstairs.”
I point out the front window. I never had any reason before to notice that you can see the tops of Sun Coast's caf, umbrellas from down here, that Saltwater Tammy's was a stone's throw away from the coffee shop upstairs.
A stone or a bullet-take your pick.
Ceepak and I walk purposefully up the boardwalk ramps to the third level. Other cops are scouting all the other possible sniper locations. We're only walking when we'd rather run because the chief specifically ordered us not to run, not to draw any “undue attention” to ourselves.
“Where was he?” Ceepak asks.
“Over there. That table. Closest to the door.”
I notice Ceepak's eyes scanning the horizon. I do the same. Mook is long gone.
“Was the other one here?” Ceepak asks. “His soldier friend?”
“No. Not that I saw.”
We reach the café table and do a quick visual survey of the scene. No plastic-wrapped trading cards. Ceepak feels around underneath the table.
Stops.
“What's wrong?”
“I forgot to put on my gloves.”
Ceepak pulls his hands out from under the table, reaches into his cargo pants, pulls out a pair of white evidence gloves, slips them over his hands, and goes back to work, patting under the bottom of the circular table.
He finds something, drops to his knees, fishes out his tweezers. He peels whatever it is from the underside of the table.
“Baseball card.” Ceepak shows me his tweezered treasure. “Derek Jeter. New York Yankees.”
“Excuse me? Officers?”
We look over. It's this guy wearing a chef's apron and bow tie. He has colorful buttons pinned up and down his apron straps. I recognize the costume. It's what the waiters wear at The Chowder Pot. I check out their outdoor dining deck. If you kneeled behind the wooden railing, you'd have another clean shot down at Saltwater Tammy's windows.
“I was setting up tables on the deck, and I think somebody might've lost this. Sorry it's wet. The sprinklers must've hit it this morning.” He holds another baseball card with water beads dotting its plastic sleeve. “It's Jeter's rookie card. 1996. Could be pretty valuable. Figure I better turn it in.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ceepak uses his tweezers to take it from him. “Thank you for doing the right thing. This card might prove very valuable, indeed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Thirty minutes later, the municipal brain trust from the Sea Haven Chamber of Commerce and the mayor's office is assembled inside Saltwater Tammy's.
Good thing the candy shop has bright fluorescent bulbs. Because the plywood walls the police crew propped against the windows have totally blocked out any natural light. Two cops are posted in front of the makeshift door-a sheet of plywood that wasn't screw-gunned into place with all the others. Tammy won't be very happy when she sees what we've done with her place.
Mazzilli is behind the counter. He helps himself to free malted milk balls. Mayor Sinclair is next to him nibbling nervously on a foot-long gummi worm, taking it in a centimeter at a time, like Bugs Bunny working his way down a carrot. I'd write them both up for shoplifting, but we're kind of busy.
“I still feel we can safely assume no immediate threat to the general population,” Baines says, mostly to hear himself say it.
“You're right,” Mazzilli says and pops another malted milk ball in his mouth. “It's some kind of vendetta against one young man and his friends.” He points at me. There's melted chocolate smeared all over his fingers.
“He's right,” says Mr. Weese, the mortgage broker. “We can't risk everything we've worked for all year long to protect one individual. Sorry, son.”
Yeah, as long as your kids and grandkids are safe, who cares about everybody else?
“Boyle here is a professional,” Chief Baines says. “He understands that this town cannot and will not be held hostage by terrorists.”
Baines is strutting again. His flop sweat is gone. Somebody must've brought him a fresh shirt from the office. It also looks like he nipped into Tammy's washroom and slicked down his hair after a refreshing head dunk in the sink.
“Officer Ceepak and his team will continue their investigation. Right, John?” Baines doesn't give Ceepak time to answer. “Meanwhile, we'll tell anybody who asks that what happened here this morning was the work of intoxicated college students armed with BB guns.”
BB guns, my ass.
We found another one of those special ball cartridges buried in the cinnamon-hearts tub. It had been meant for me, but I'd just happened to duck down to open a crate of candy when it whizzed past. The good news? Ceepak says the hole in the window coupled with the hole in the Plexiglas Red Hots tub will enable us to calculate a pretty precise trajectory. Two points make a straight line, he reminded me.
Dr. McDaniels is also on her way. She'll probably point out something we don't see, probably something that's right under our noses.
Ceepak has been working his phone. I told him what Mook told me this morning: that he'd been paying for his Sea Haven stay with a credit card. Ceepak just asked our computer people back at the house to track Mook's recent transactions and tell us which motel.
Other calls are also going out from headquarters to sporting goods stores and eBay on account of all the Derek Jeter baseball cards. So far, we have seven, one Jeter taped in almost every possible sniper location. Upstairs at the coffee shop and The Chowder Pot, across the street at the water slide, on top of the schooner mast-the Derek Jeters were everywhere. The ones near any kind of shrubbery were wet, spritzed by sprinklers.
“Our doer placed them prior to six A.M.,” Ceepak concludes. He's talked to some maintenance people and found out when Schooner's Landing automatically flips on the waterworks every morning. “The hydration moves across the mall in a series of contiguous zones. Each zone is sprayed for an interval of ten to twelve minutes. The timers initiate the spraying cycle at five A.M., complete it at six-oh-two.”
The wet cards were in place before 6:02 A.M. Mook must've pulled an all-nighter.
And all of the Derek Jeter cards are from his first year with the New York Yankees, 1996.
“This one's worth twenty-five, thirty bucks,” Mazzilli tells us when he sees the card the waiter found at The Chowder Pot. It shows Jeter, his eyes squinting in the Bronx sun, chasing some kind of pop fly. “That's a Select Certified Blue.”
Bruno knows his “memorabilia.” In his shops up and down the boardwalk he peddles postcards, collectible foam beer Koozies, fake street signs that say stuff like “Parking For Italian Americans Only,” and T-shirts featuring “The Man,” with an arrow pointing up at your face, and “The Legend,” with another arrow pointing down at your pants.