Chapter 4
The morning did not arrive with the golden radiance Beckett felt he deserved. It came as a bruised, wet thumbprint pressed against the horizon, bleeding cold gray light over the slate roofs of Maybrook.
By ten o’clock, the rain had settled into a sullen, uninterrupted drizzle. Beckett sat behind his desk, having slept barely three hours on the leather chesterfield in his private office suite. He had shaved with a straight razor, dressed in a fresh charcoal bespoke suit from his wardrobe closet, and drunk two double espressos that did nothing to quell the hot, prickly hum in his blood.
On the easel across the room, the painting of Blackwood Ridge stood on display.
In the daylight, the oil paint had oxidized slightly, the Prussian blues settling into the canvas like pooled ink. Beckett had spent half the night staring at that painted shard of red tail light in the ditch. The wisp of smoke above the Devil’s Gorge lodge had seemed like a promise at midnight. Now, in the sterile morning light, it looked almost like an open wound.
The private brass intercom on his desk gave a sharp, double chirp.
Beckett pressed the button with a steady forefinger. "Yes, Mrs. Gable?"
"Mr. Beckett, there is a gentleman here from the State Police Criminal Investigation Division," his secretary said. Her voice, normally a smooth purr of Midwestern deference, was tight. "He does not have an appointment, but he presented a credentials card. A Detective Vance."
The name struck Beckett like an electric shock straight through the base of his skull.
His hand remained resting on the polished wood. Not a single muscle in his jaw twitched. He had spent twenty years negotiating zoning boards, crushing union representatives, and dining with state senators; his face was a marble mask carved for the precise purpose of giving away nothing.
"Did Detective Vance state the nature of his business?"
"He said it was regarding an open county inquiry, sir. He insisted it would be in your best interest to give him ten minutes."
Beckett looked at the easel.
Slowly, deliberately, he walked around his desk, lifted the canvas from its walnut rest, and slid it into the narrow, velvet-lined vertical slot built into his private safe behind the cherry wood paneling. He clicked the heavy dial shut. The wall closed. The room returned to its immaculate, unblemished state.
He smoothed the silk lapels of his jacket, walked back to his chair, and took his seat.
"Show him in, Mrs. Gable."
A moment later, the heavy mahogany door swung inward.
Detective Vance did not look like the local Maybrook patrolmen Beckett kept on his Christmas gift list. Those men wore starched blue uniforms, carried themselves with small-town deference, and always smelled of diner coffee and dry cleaning.
Vance was tall, gaunt, and carried the heavy, stoic inertia of an iron bridge. He wore a rumpled wool overcoat that had seen too many damp autopsies and a muted brown suit that had clearly been purchased off the rack a decade ago. His hair was cropped close, the color of wet gravel, and his eyes—pale, watery blue—did not blink as they mapped the penthouse in a single, sweeping rotation.
He didn't look at the contemporary art on the walls. He didn't look at the panoramic view of the Maybrook riverfront. He looked straight at Ronald Beckett.
"Mr. Beckett," Vance said. His voice was quiet, raspy, with the flat, unhurried cadence of a man who worked primarily in rooms with soundproof walls. "Thank you for the time."
"Detective. Have a seat." Beckett gestured toward the tufted leather armchairs opposite his desk. "Mrs. Gable can bring us some coffee. We have an Ethiopian roast that—"
"I don't need coffee, Mr. Beckett," Vance said, sitting down without unbuttoning his overcoat. He placed a leather-bound notebook and a small manila evidence sleeve onto the edge of the glass desk. "And I know your time is billed at roughly six hundred dollars an hour to the Maybrook Port Authority, so I’ll keep this within the realm of public service."
Beckett smiled. It was his signature boardroom smile—warm, paternal, entirely devoid of warmth behind the retinas.
"Public service is the cornerstone of everything we do here, Detective. What can the Heritage Trust do for the State Police?"
Vance leaned back, resting his rough, scarred palms on his knees. "I’m assigned to the cold case unit out of the capital. Special assignment under the State Attorney General’s traffic fatalities review."
"A noble division. Long hours, I imagine."
"Mostly paperwork," Vance murmured, his pale eyes drifting across Beckett’s face. "Reading yellowed notebooks written by retired troopers who missed things. Or who were told to miss things by county commissioners who wanted clean tourism brochures."
The air in the office dropped five degrees.
Beckett leaned forward, lacing his fingers together on the obsidian blotter. "If there’s an issue with municipal oversight in Maybrook, Detective, you’re in the wrong office. The Mayor’s council meets on Thursdays."
"I’m not here about municipal oversight," Vance said. He tapped the manila evidence sleeve with a yellowish fingernail. "I’m here about Blackwood Ridge. October twelfth, ten years ago."
The room seemed to shrink. The gentle hum of the building's central heating system suddenly sounded like the rush of water in an alpine creek bed.
Beckett didn't flinch. He allowed a subtle expression of solemn contemplation to wash over his features—the exact look he used when attending the funerals of local aldermen.
"Blackwood Ridge," Beckett said slowly, letting the syllables roll out like old coins. "That was the Miller family, wasn't it? The station wagon that went off the cliff during the blizzard. A terrible tragedy. The Trust made a donation to the county search-and-rescue team that season."
"Did you?" Vance’s brow lifted slightly. "That was generous. Considering the official report closed it out as driver error due to black ice."
"Was it not?"
"It was," Vance said. "Until three weeks ago. County highway maintenance finally got state funding to dredge the culvert at Mile 14. They brought in an excavator to clear ten years of silt and dead hemlock roots from the drainage trench sixty yards upstream from where the Miller wagon landed."
Vance reached down, picked up the manila sleeve, and tilted it toward the light.
Inside the clear plastic window lay three small objects: two jagged flakes of dark green automotive paint, and a twisted strip of chrome trim no longer than Beckett’s index finger.
"Spectrophotometry is a wonderful thing, Mr. Beckett," Vance said, his tone conversational, almost bored. "Ten years ago, the state crime lab was running basic gas chromatography. Today, we can take a paint chip the size of a pinhead and tell you not just the manufacturer, but the batch number, the chemical composition of the primer, and the atmospheric conditions in the paint booth the day the panel was sprayed."
Beckett felt the blood pounding in his temples, a heavy, rhythmic percussion. *Drag-tap. Drag-tap.*
"Fascinating," Beckett murmured. "Forensic science has made remarkable strides."
"It really has," Vance agreed. "For instance, these chips didn't come from a 1998 Ford Taurus station wagon. The Taurus was beige. The primer on these chips is a high-zinc aerospace epoxy used exclusively by custom coachbuilders in England during the late nineteen-sixties. And the topcoat is British Racing Green—specifically, nitrocellulose lacquer blended for Aston Martin between 1965 and 1970."
