Sun, Sand, Murder Page 7

  Local KTRH traffic reporter Mary Catherine “Cat” Wells received a baptism by fire as a US Army helicopter pilot in Desert Storm. The daughter of retired army chief warrant officer Neville Wells, Cat grew up at army bases around the world, including Germany, Hawaii, Japan, and Puerto Rico. On graduating from high school, she enlisted in the army “to fly helicopters just like [her] dad.”

  At a time when women’s roles in the army were still evolving, Cat Wells became one of its first female combat aviators. Less than six months after completing her flight training at age 22, she was sent to Illesheim, Germany, to join the Second Squadron of the Sixth Cavalry as its first female Apache helicopter pilot.

  When the “Fighting Sixth” deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1991, Wells found herself involved in the conflict for which she and the rest of the 2/6th would receive the Valorous Unit Award from the Secretary of the Army. Flying in all of the combat missions of the 2/6th during the war, she was personally responsible for the destruction of a dozen Iraqi armored vehicles, including four tanks.

  “It was tough at first, being the only female pilot in my unit. Some of the older guys grumbled about having a ‘lady pilot’ on their wing if it all hit the fan. But when combat finally began, we all worked together and no one worried about having me as their wingman,” she said.

  The camaraderie of the unit is evident in the photo of the 2/6th pilots below. Taken on the day hostilities ceased, Wells is shown carrying the same sidearm that her father wore in Vietnam.

  “The standard-issue sidearm for helicopter crews at that time was the Beretta nine-millimeter, but I always carried my dad’s Smith & Wesson .38. He gave it to me just before I left on my first deployment, and it always felt like he was there protecting me when I wore it,” Wells said. Sadly, her father died only two days after this photo was taken.

  Cat Wells served ten years as an army aviator before returning to civilian life as Houston’s Traffic Eye at KTRH in 2000. While she enjoys her work in civilian life, she misses the excitement of flying for the army. As she put it, “Civilian life is safe and routine, but nothing makes you feel more alive than heading out on a mission where you don’t know what you will encounter and how you will overcome it.”

  Below the article was a photograph of seven men and Cat. The stark tan of the desert made up the foreground and background color, with a cloudless sky overhead. The eight stood in front of a lethal-looking helicopter bristling with weapons. All were dressed in desert camouflage fatigues. Some carried sidearms strapped to their thighs or in shoulder holsters. Their boots were dusty, as if they had defeated Saddam Hussein’s army by marching against it, rather than flying. All wore smiles of relief, smiles of success and victory, smiles at the prospect of going home. In the grainy two-decade-old photograph, Cat’s appearance was essentially the same as now. She still wore her hair cropped close and her face was still unlined and youthful.

  I did not know until then that Cat had distinguished herself in Desert Storm. She had touched on it briefly but had downplayed her role and seemed reluctant to discuss it. I suppose when you have killed in combat it is not something you wish to relive. I was also surprised to learn she had lived in Puerto Rico when she was growing up. She had never mentioned it, though San Juan is only about a hundred miles away. Sometimes Cat seemed to be only slightly less a mystery than Paul Kelliher.

  Chapter Ten

  The hours spent on Pamela Pickering’s computer felt like fishing without catching any fish, except it took place in the quiet box of an office without the benefit of the lambent sun and warm waters of the flats. I decided to head home, with a stop at the Methodist church on the way to see if Anthony Wedderburn was having better luck than me.

  Stepping into the monastic quiet of the Thursday-afternoon church was disconcerting. I had not crossed the threshold of the little church on many Thursdays, or other days for that matter, in the last few years. I was especially adept at avoiding Sundays, despite the inevitable admonition about the destination of my immortal soul from a disapproving Icilda.

  Anthony was seated with his back to me at a long narrow table normally used for hymnals. He had placed the hymnals in neat stacks in the nearest pew. The table was covered with a chaotic array of working papers, over which he hunched absorbed in concentration.

  “Good afternoon, Anthony.”

  My greeting seemed to pull Anthony gradually to the surface from someplace very deep. As he turned, his eyes hesitated for a moment as their focus changed from the page before him to my face. He smiled, not the goofy, ganja-induced smile he had worn since the first day we met, but the genuine smile of a man greeting a good friend. The pupils of his eyes were normal, and the whites were not their usual web of red veins. He sat up straight and squared his shoulders. He was clean-shaven. His blond dreadlocks were washed and as neat as dreadlocks can ever be. He was no longer De White Rasta. He was a man with a purpose.

  “Delightful to see you, Teddy. I am making good progress here. I should have this thing cracked in another day or two. Honestly, this is the most fun I have had in years.” Anthony’s public school accent did not seem as out of place coming from his mouth as it once had.

  “Have you broken the code, or some part of it?” I asked. I was hoping for a hint of success to prevent the morning excursion with Mr. and Mrs. Yes from being the highlight of my day.

  “Here, Teddy, have a look. I have one line. I picked it out of the middle of the book. I just had a feeling I might be able to knock it.” Anthony shoved a paper from the pile in front of him into my hand.

  On the back of last month’s church bulletin, Anthony had scribbled a long single line of letters followed by the same letters broken into four rows angling across the page. The letters in the first row were in parentheses:

  (H) (W) (S) (E) (F) (O) (H) (A) (T) (F) (O)

  A R 5 X L 3 H D V U 9

  9 E N B 1 P T 4 G Y I

  E A W T R M E D O O T

  “It turns out the middle two rows are dead rows, so the ‘rail fence’ is the first and the last row only, like so.” Anthony quickly put parentheses on the letters of the bottom row and then wrote out the combined first and last rows in the order they appeared. He placed slashes between some of the letters:

  H E / W A S / W E T / F R O M / H E A D / T O / F O O T

  “Not bad for a blackheart man, eh, Teddy? It was a bit of a rough go at the start; I had some trouble with focus. But now that I have some of the cobwebs cleared away, I shan’t be long with the rest. It is a simple matter of figuring out the pattern of dead rows. There is probably a repeating sequence of numbers.” Anthony beamed and continued, “Give me two days to work out the dead-row sequence and it will be cracked. Any idea about the meaning of what I have so far?”

  “I wish I had some idea, Anthony, but nothing comes immediately to mind.”

  “Well, cheerio. I am certain it will all be clear soon.” Anthony turned back to his scattered papers. I was obviously being dismissed by a busy man hard at work, so I headed home.

  * * *

  Icilda was at the stove when I walked through the door, her sturdy bulk obscuring the food she was cooking. I had not eaten since breakfast and the smell made me realize how hungry I was. Icilda had always been a great cook. I hugged her and glanced over her shoulder. Pumpkin soup, sweet potatoes and onions, and fried grouper fingers.

  She shrugged me off. “Where you been, Teddy?”

  I gave her the sanitized version of my day. “Had a fishing charter from the hotel, then went to the police station to do a little work, and then stopped in at the church.”

  “The church? I can’t get you there for the Sunday service but you go there on your day off in the middle of the week?”

  “I was checking up on Anthony Wedderburn.”

  “I saw De Rasta there yesterday when I stopped to pick up the lesson for the Ladies’ Circle,” she said. “He was over in the corner by himself. He seemed … cleaner. What is going on with him? Did you persuade him to go to c
hurch, Teddy?”

  “He is helping me with something and we decided that the church would be a nice quiet place to work.”

  Unlike Cat, Icilda did not seem to think it unusual that De Rasta would be working with me. Instead, her thoughts immediately leaped to the possibility of saving Lord Wedderburn’s soul.

  “Has this work you have given him inspired him to change his ways? Should I talk to Pastor Lloyd about helping him to accept Jesus as his Savior?” There was fervor in Icilda’s voice heard only on the not-infrequent occasions when she mentioned Jesus and Pastor Lloyd in the same sentence.

  “I think he may need to do some soul-searching of his own before he is ready to speak to the pastor. I’ll let you know when the time is right.” I hoped this would be enough to keep Icilda from siccing the slightly effeminate Pastor Lloyd and his stable of earnest church ladies on De Rasta. At least until the work on the notebook was complete.

  The dodge seemed to work; Icilda shifted her inquiry. “What kind of work is De Rasta doing for you? I’ve never known him to do work of any kind, outside of cultivating his shag patch.”

  “He’s helping me on the murder case. He is working on decoding a notebook I found in the victim’s personal effects. He said he has some expertise with that kind of thing and I’m hoping it will help in finding the killer.”

  “I thought you were off the case?” Icilda concentrated on ladling the soup into bowls, despite the question in her inflection.

  “I’m doing a little investigating on my own to see if I can help.”

  Icilda turned from her soup, brandishing the ladle like a weapon. She had an angry frown that seemed to appear more often lately on her face. “On your own? Are you sure you should be doing that, Teddy? We need you to keep that job. Aren’t you in enough trouble with the deputy commissioner already?”

  She was right. I knew she was right. I told her she was right, that it was an unnecessary risk to my job. I told her I would stop investigating and leave the job to the professionals in Road Town.

  I lied. I deceived Icilda about stopping my investigation, just as I deceived her about Cat Wells, just as I deceived Rollie Stoutt about the notebook, just as I deceived Cat about going on with our relationship. I did it because deception was easier than fighting the fight, easier than explaining myself, easier than facing my guilt. I bought peace with this deception, as I did with all my deceptions, knowing the peace was temporary and the day of reckoning would come.

  After dinner, I sat in the quiet outside, listening to the chatter between Icilda and Tamia as they did the dinner dishes, and thinking about how easily deceit and duplicity came to me these days.

  It was not a pleasant way to pass the evening.

  Chapter Eleven

  It rained during the night, a gentle, steady rain, the kind of rain that is always a surprise on Anegada, where most rains are either a quick burst from a squall or an apocalyptic three-day deluge accompanied by the frightening beast that is a hurricane. The rain was gone by sunrise, the air washed clear and clean.

  My dark mood had been cleansed by the rain as well. I hummed Bob Marley’s “Sun Is Shining” as I began my routine patrol circuit driving west from The Settlement. The Bomba Charger, on its thrice-a-week run from Tortola, was due to arrive just after eight a.m., so the government dock at Setting Point was my first stop.

  Leaning against the hood of the Land Rover watching the ferry passengers disembark, I pondered the next step in the investigation in which I had now promised everyone but my mother that I would not participate. By the time the last passenger drifted away, I had come to the realization that I had no leads in the case. The only reasonable course was to wait for Anthony Wedderburn to finish deciphering the notebook and hope its contents would give some direction.

  Having abandoned reason several days ago, I decided to use my patrol to retrace some of the steps I had already taken and see if there was something I had missed along the way. I would begin by visiting Wendell George. Maybe he could make sense out of the single decoded line of Kelliher’s notebook.

  * * *

  I eased the Land Rover through the sand parking area at the Pomato Point Restaurant, using low gear and taking care to avoid the particularly soft parts. The long straight beach to the west of the building was devoid of human presence. A black-hulled catamaran was anchored, fore and aft, a few yards offshore. There was no one on its deck. A lizard on the hunt for a tasty fly breakfast was the only sign of life as I walked up the three tiled steps into the shaded interior of the restaurant. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust.

  The Mistress was across the room, stretching to dust the bottles on the high shelving behind the bar. She hummed as she worked, “La Vie en Rose,” her voice throaty and rich as a velvet robe. Humming seemed to be the order of the day.

  I cleared my throat, hoping not to startle her.

  “Good morning, Constable. A fine morning, isn’t it?” She spoke while continuing her dusting. It was the first time I had ever heard her speak and I realized what I had been missing all these years. The rich contralto in which she had hummed was married with a breathy island French accent, possibly from Martinique. My thoughts strayed to the seedy decay of Fort-de-France, black coffee and Cointreau, and making love in the afternoon. How did Wendell manage to keep his mind on treasure?

  “A fine morning, indeed, Miss … eh,” I hesitated, realizing that we had never been introduced and I did not know her name.

  “Marie. Please call me Marie, Constable.”

  I would have called her the queen of Sheba if the request came in that intoxicating tone.

  “I suppose you are looking for Wendell,” she continued.

  “Yes … Marie.” After so many years of her silence, learning her name and speaking it for the first time made me feel excited and somehow ashamed at the same time.

  “Wendell is gone. Wendell is toujours gone since you came with the maps and the notebook. He hunts the treasure. Every day he is gone before the sun is up. Every night he returns after the sun is down. He goes far out to the East End. He is there now, with his shovels, and his compass, and his detector of metals. He is exhausted, but he is up half the night, plotting on his maps. He thinks there is a treasure and he thinks he knows where it is but he finds rien, nothing. He digs and digs, comme un fou, like a crazy man. He will tire of it before he finds a thing, because there is not a thing to find.” She had a great deal more to say today than she ever had before, but she did not seem upset or angry, just resigned.

  “Why do you say there is nothing to find?” The question came out as a reaction, spoken before I thought about whether it was important. Just another example of my clever police work.

  “The Professor Kelliher, he search and dig for how long? Cinq ans, five years, eh? And Wendell, his whole life with his detector of metals, to find what? A musket ball here, a nail there, a handful of coins. If there was this treasure to be found, Wendell would have found it, or this professor would have found it, in all this searching. There is no treasure; there is no thing to find. There is only the foolish avarice, the greed.” She shook her head, the soft curls framing her face bouncing like orchids in the breeze.

  “If not for treasure, why would someone kill Paul Kelliher?” I asked, as if she had the answer.

  “Yes, yes, why? Why search out this professor, go out to the Spanish Camp from … where? From Tortola? Or does this killer come from further? The US? South America? Europe? Why come so far to kill a man? I have not this answer but my people have un proverbe, this what you call … saying, when you wish to know pourquoi, when you wish to know why … cherchez la femme. Look for the woman. There may not be any treasure but there is a woman in this mystery you try to solve. There always is. Look for the woman and the rest will show itself to you, Constable.”

  Marie brought her eyes up to meet mine with a cool, steady gaze. I know what you are thinking, but it was not that kind of gaze. And besides, I already had my plate completely full in that arena.
No, Marie’s eyes unfailingly told me to get out there and find the woman and her role in this mystery, and not to be a disappointment to her like Wendell. Taking a page from the Mistress’s book, I nodded silently and took my leave.

  * * *

  As I turned toward the West End, a glint of morning sun on the outrageous mango yellow of a VI Birds helicopter flying low over the water caught my eye. As customs officer, I would have been notified in advance if a landing was intended, so its passengers were probably some folks with money to burn on an aerial sightseeing tour of the BVI. There were several helicopter pilots at VI Birds, but I imagined that Cat was at the stick and wondered whether the tour she gave would include the beaches and bays where we had made love. The copter crossed from water to land, staying low, less than fifty feet off the deck, and didn’t seem to be in a touring mode, making a direct line for the airport. Maybe the passengers were coming from Tortola and did not need to clear customs. I decided to check in at the airport as my patrol took me around the island.

  As I rounded the turn at the West End, the road was completely blocked by seven scrawny cattle. Rather than nudge them with the Land Rover, I stopped and waited for them to amble out of the way. I thought about Marie’s suggestion. A strategy of cherchez la femme might give some much-needed new direction to my stalled investigation. But a moment’s thought made me realize that not only were there no women associated with Paul Kelliher’s death, there were no human beings whatsoever known to be involved, unless you counted De White Rasta coming upon the body, and I could not bring myself to consider him a suspect. There was no wife, no girlfriend, and no other man’s woman in the picture. The only woman who could even be placed with Kelliher was Belle Lloyd, his only real contact on Anegada. The road took me directly past Cow Wreck Bay. Cherchez la femme, I thought. Here I go.

  * * *

  Friday is usually restful and quiet on Anegada. Bareboat charters in the BVI end on Saturdays at noon, and the sailors usually head back to Tortola for a hard-partying Friday night before turning in their boats the next morning. This means a boat exodus from Anegada each Friday morning at dawn, or as soon after as hangovers will allow, and Anegada for the Anegadians until the following Tuesday or Wednesday, when the new crop of sailors arrives.