Sun, Sand, Murder

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  To Irene, with love

  Prologue

  Walking along the water’s edge, the killer thought about the gun. Was bringing it the right thing to do? It was meant to frighten the man, to show him that this was serious business, to let him know that he could not cast someone aside so easily. There was a weight, a heft, to the gun in the bottom of the bag, and there was power in that weight. The killer needed the power the gun held. Yes, bringing the gun was right. The killer felt strong, and the gun multiplied that strength.

  After a mile, the killer turned from the water and climbed the low dune. From the top, the man could be seen on the flat land below, still digging though it was late in the day. The man did not notice he wasn’t alone until the killer was upon him, standing at the brink of the pit where the man bent with his shovel. The man was sweating but clean, the killer noticed, the white sand in which he dug not clinging to his shorts or his shirtless torso.

  “I told you not to come back here,” the man said. He boosted himself from the hole using the handle of the shovel, and, once up, he cast the shovel aside and placed his hands on his hips.

  “We had an agreement,” the killer said.

  “I told you yesterday, the agreement’s off.”

  “You can’t do that to me.”

  The man laughed. “I can and I have.”

  “It’s not that easy. Not with me,” the killer began.

  The man took a step forward and struck the killer against the side of the head with his fist. Ears ringing with the blow, the killer staggered and fell. The iron taste of blood spread across the killer’s tongue; a tooth had cut the inside of the killer’s cheek.

  The man stood above as the killer reached into the bag and closed trembling fingers around the checked pistol grip. Drawing the gun and feeling its weight, the killer pointed the barrel up at the man and felt the power of the gun and the strength it gave.

  “I am so tired of all this trouble with the help,” the man said, and reached down for the gun.

  The killer looked directly into the man’s eyes and pulled the trigger. The man’s eyes had no time to register fear, or surprise, before the .38 slug entered just above the bridge of his nose and tore off the back of his skull.

  The killer rose slowly and gazed down at the body sprawled in the hot sand.

  “You fucked with the wrong person,” the killer said, and turned east to walk back along the beach.

  As the killer crested the dune, the first of the land crabs scuttled toward the man’s corpse.

  Chapter One

  I ran my hand along the smooth curve of Cat Wells’s hip. Fine grains of sand adhered where she had rolled from the blanket as we made love. She dozed in the sun, or pretended to. I looked out across the placid waters of Windlass Bight and wondered how I had gotten myself into this mess. Living in a simple place does not always make for a simple life.

  I suppose it wasn’t truly a mess because no one knew Cat and I had been meeting in secluded spots around the island for the last six months. Icilda, my wife, neither knew nor suspected anything was amiss in our marriage. Icilda’s daily routine of home and kids, waiting tables at the Reef Hotel, and any spare moments devoted to her activities at the Methodist church did not allow time for the detection of infidelity.

  Not that she had any cause to be suspicious. I had been a model husband throughout our marriage. A good breadwinner, working three steady jobs and guiding on the side. A good father to our children, Tamia and Kevin. Always attentive to Icilda’s needs and wants. Faithful throughout our twenty years together.

  Until now. Now I was unfaithful, a cheater, a selfish lowlife, a dirtbag. I knew what I was doing could ruin my marriage and my family but try as I might I could not give Cat up, could not act with respect for my wife, could not honor my marriage vows.

  I’m still not sure how my affair with Cat got its start. I know precisely when it all began; it is the “how” that seems so hard to grasp. The “when” was a fine September morning. I was to meet two anglers traveling from St. Thomas for a day of fly-fishing on the shallow bonefish flats that surround much of my home island, Anegada. My contact in St. Thomas told me the clients would be arriving at Captain Auguste George Airport on VI Birds Air Charters. The pilot was new to the Virgin Islands and both she and the clients would need to clear customs at the airport. This was not a problem, since, in addition to my other occupations, I am the customs officer for Anegada.

  There were no other incoming flights scheduled for that morning. I arrived early and waited alone inside the one-room shed that serves as the airport terminal. HRH Queen Elizabeth II stared balefully down on me from the faded coronation portrait that had graced the terminal wall since the building’s dedication. The southeast trade wind wafted through the open door. A hen and three black chicks searched for morsels along the edge of the gravel runway. Otherwise, nothing and no one seemed to be about.

  A few minutes after the scheduled arrival time, the silence of the morning was broken by the approach of a helicopter from the southwest. I shielded my eyes from blowing dust as the mango-yellow VI Birds copter settled in the taxi area and its rotors wound down.

  Cat Wells emerged from the pilot’s seat, wearing an unplugged radio headset draped like a fur around her exquisite neck. She was certainly different from the other pilots who flew to Anegada, usually eager pups hoping to work their way up the ladder to a job with a commercial airline. Unlike the pups, Cat Wells had presence, the kind of presence that stops male conversation when she enters a room. She moved with purpose across the taxi area, lithe and professional in khaki pants and a crisp white shirt with captain’s bars on its shoulders. Her flawless mahogany complexion and her regal bearing called Nefertiti to mind, astray by three millennia but still serene and self-assured. Seeing me standing in the terminal entrance, she approached with an extended hand.

  “Hi. Are you the customs man?” Her eyes were the deep green of a mountain lake, a rare attribute in a black woman. Those eyes took in my faded and frayed constable shirt, worn shorts, and sandals with a look of disapproval. Well, perhaps “disapproval” is too strong a word; the look had more than a hint of pity mixed in. Like a mother inspecting a child who had dressed himself in his favorite outfit, again, for the fifth day in a row. A slow burn of embarrassment rose from my neck to my ears. I was thankful my dark skin did not betray the flush.

  “I am the customs officer for Anegada, and a special constable on the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force.” For a reason that I could not fathom, the reply was delivered in a formal parade-ground voice. I instantly felt like an ass.

  Cat came smartly to attention, lifting her outstretched hand into a snappy military salute. “Yes, suh!” she replied, drill sergeant sharp.

  I felt like a huge ass.

  An up-at-the-corner grin flashed across her face. I laughed. She laughed, no girlish giggle, a woman’s laugh, warm and full.

 
; “Mary Catherine Wells,” she said, introducing herself. She dropped her hand from the salute and extended it in greeting again.

  “Teddy Creque. It is a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Wells.” I shook her hand. She allowed it to linger in my grasp. An invitation?

  “My friends call me Cat. You can call me Cat.” The sly grin again.

  I was barely able to compose myself enough to collect the clients and their fishing gear, stamp their passports, and load them into my battered Royal Virgin Islands Police Force Land Rover. As I backed out of the parking space, my eyes were drawn to the sway of Cat’s hips as she strolled back to the helicopter. Her timing was impeccable as she glanced back and caught me looking. The grin appeared a third time, followed by a little wave. I was hooked like a bonefish.

  After that first encounter, it seemed as if events took over. I was not the instigator but certainly a willing participant. Cat’s imp grin evolved into a saucy smile. Her playful eyes developed a seductive spark. When she flew in with passengers or cargo, the banter between us was light, smart, and sexy.

  She flew in one day a month after our first encounter with guests for the Reef Hotel. After they were met and driven away, she offered to share a thermos of coffee with me. We sat in the shade of the terminal shed and talked for an hour. She told me about growing up “everywhere” as an army brat, how the military was her family business, and how she had become a pilot and served in the Persian Gulf in Operation Desert Storm. My part in the conversation was a description of my work as a fishing guide and a few tales of life here on the island.

  I told myself that it was just friendly and innocent, but we both knew what was crackling just below the surface of our conversation. We were on the brink of acting out the same play that had been acted out a million times since the first innocent man had a coffee with an innocent woman he had not told his wife about. I spent the entire drive back to The Settlement that day convincing myself that nothing had happened and nothing was happening.

  The following week Cat flew in with a cargo of spare generator parts and a six-pack of Red Stripe. We drove to Windlass Bight with nary a word, drank the beer, and made love on a blanket in the shade of the sea grape trees.

  Then I went home to Icilda and the kids. As Icilda made dinner, she complained about a rude customer at the hotel restaurant who had left no tip. Tamia whined for permission to go shopping with a friend on Tortola over the weekend. Kevin proudly showed off a report card with all Bs as his marks. It was like any normal night in the Creque household, except for Cat’s gasps, and her ultimate exclamation, playing out in my memory as a background soundtrack to the evening. It was like any normal night, if a normal night included the searing guilt of betraying your wife and children.

  So it had been for these past few months, once or twice every week. Cat and I had savored each other’s bodies neck-deep in the clear waters of Bones Bight. We had hasty, half-clothed sex against the wall of the deserted airport terminal. She had rocked languidly atop me at Table Bay, the motion of her hips timed to the thunder of the surf against the offshore reef. It was not love, or even the shadow of love. Neither of us harbored that illusion. It was lust, pure and simple. We took sex hungrily from one another and did not ask many questions, of each other or of ourselves.

  After each tryst, I returned to my life as if what had occurred had never happened. I went to my shift at the power plant and drowsed to the hum of the generator. I poled my skiff, the Lily B, a sweating Yankee fisherman on the bow platform, and strained to spot bonefish through the mirror surface of the water. I ran my police patrol around the dusty washboard tracks we call roads on Anegada, stopping at the Cow Wreck Beach Bar and Grill to show the sunburned tourists sipping rum drinks that they were safe, despite the fact that the nearest real RVIPF officer was miles away on Tortola. I saw to Icilda’s carnal needs, with a detachment she did not seem to notice. Or at least care about.

  I was leading two lives, one dull, ordinary, and filled with virtue, the second risky, clandestine, and exciting. I knew that I should stop seeing Cat. It was the right thing to do and it was the only way to extract myself from this undiscovered mess. It was the only way to recover some shred of my self-respect. I resolved time and time again to end the thing I had with her. Each time I failed, weak, never raising the topic, succumbing to her smile, to the uninhibited joy of being in her presence, the danger, and the need of my body to have hers.

  Now she rolled toward me, waking and showing her mischievous grin. The day’s unspoken vow to end our affair would remain unfulfilled. I stroked the back of her neck. She arched herself into my body.

  “Teddy. Teddy. You there? Pick up.” The aging CB in the Land Rover, the only sure means of communication on Anegada given the lack of cell phone service and the unwillingness of the bureaucrats in Road Town to invest in an actual police radio, carried the urgency in Pamela Pickering’s voice.

  “Teddy. Teddy. It’s Pamela. Pick up, please!” Pamela is Anegada’s administrator, the island’s only public official other than me. The eldest child of Pinder Pickering, Anegada’s first administrator, Pamela believes herself to be Anegada royalty. She inherited her position when Pinder’s consumption of Heineken forced him to make his de facto retirement to the Reef Hotel bar official. On his most alcohol-clouded day, Pinder was ten times as competent as the lazy and disorganized Pamela.

  “Teddy. Teddy. It’s an emergency!” Pamela squawked. The last emergency call Pamela had made to me was when her car was out of gas and she was in danger of missing the ferry to Tortola. It was not the first occasion she had treated me as her personal servant, though she had no actual authority over me. I usually acceded to her “orders”; it was easier than arguing with her.

  I rose from the blanket and reached in the window of the Land Rover. Cat followed and curled against me, sliding a hand ever so slowly down my groin.

  I grabbed the CB microphone, overcoming the urge to grab Cat instead.

  “This is Teddy. Switch to the alternate channel.” Everyone on Anegada monitored channel 16 like a party telephone line. There was no need for the whole island to hear Pamela turn me into her private taxi for the second time in as many weeks.

  I flipped to the alternate channel. “All right, Pamela. What is the emergency?”

  “De Rasta here, Teddy, De White Rasta, an’ he say he found a dead man out at Spanish Camp.”

  Chapter Two

  Every child who attends the Anegada School learns that our island was discovered by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World in 1493. Columbus did not actually set foot on the island. The expedition’s flagship, Marigalante, anchored offshore while a landing party in a small boat braved a gap in the Horseshoe Reef to come ashore in search of freshwater. The place where they landed is still called Spanish Camp, although Columbus recorded in his log that his men took only three hours to fill the ship’s casks with “sweet water found in abundance” and did not even temporarily camp there. Life on Anegada has been fairly quiet since then.

  The Admiral of the Ocean Sea exercised his naming prerogative as he passed through the neighborhood he called the Islands of Santa Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins. The hilly main island of the group became Tortola, Spanish for “Turtle Dove.” The rocky island nearest to Anegada was christened Virgin Gorda, “Fat Virgin.” The romance of naming the new lands had apparently vanished by the time he named the flat slab that is my home, Anegada, the “Drowned Land.”

  The great explorer got it right. While the other Virgin Islands, both US and British, are the summits of ancient mountains projecting above the sea, Anegada is a low-lying aberration. Its highest point is a sandbank that rises only thirty feet above the waters of Bones Bight. The eastern half of the island is a limestone shelf that an eon ago was part of the fringing Horseshoe Reef. The west is a sandbar built up on the canted limestone. Most of the interior is a rock and sand desert, harboring Antillean scrub thorn, squat cactus, century plants, and pygmy orchids that thrive in
the blasting heat. No one goes into the interior except to cross to the beaches of the north and east shores.

  Or to return from those beaches. Cat and I hurriedly packed up the Land Rover following Pamela’s panicked call. The route to the police station in The Settlement took us past the airport. I dropped Cat off there, lingered only a moment to watch as she walked to her helicopter. Then I gunned the Land Rover over the washboard sand-and-limestone road toward town. I could only do forty miles per hour, jaws clenched against the jarring, while ducking low to keep my head from bouncing into the roof.

  The Land Rover had a siren but I did not use it. I had never used it. The dozen or so vehicles on Anegada rarely encountered each other on the interior roads. The greater hazard on the road is the feral cattle. Descendants of the survivors of a cattle boat sinking in the 1930s, the skeletal cows, bulls, and calves move like molasses, unfazed by horns, shouts, or sirens. After maneuvering around a half dozen of the feeble beasts, I reached the lip of pavement marking the beginning of a quarter mile of concrete road and the outer boundary of Anegada’s only town, if it can be called that, The Settlement.

  The Settlement is where I grew up and where most of Anegada’s two hundred souls live. There are no grocery stores, no pharmacies, no banks, and no fast-food restaurants there. Goats and chickens roam the sand lanes between small shacks baking in treeless yards marked by low limestone walls.

  The closest thing to illicit entertainment is Cardi’s Pool Hall, where the single snooker table with its shredded felt stands beneath a carport roof. On summer evenings, Anegada’s young toughs gather there, boasting and posing in the manner of young toughs everywhere.

  On Sunday morning, those same tough boys can be found at the island’s only licit entertainment, the Methodist church, wedged with their siblings between Madda and Dada, singing hymns.