The Keeper Read online

  Once again Fatima shook her head slowly and determinedly. “I told you that you couldn’t understand. You forget that I’m going to be with the Son of God, the Mosiach. I will be at Rebbe Dockowicz’s side when he declares himself to the world and ushers in the Kingdom of God. Do you have any idea at all how exciting that is to a Jew?”

  “I have a news bulletin for you, Fatima. It isn’t true. Your Rabbi may be a very holy man, but he isn’t the Messiah. The Millennium is going to be just one more date on the calendar for Jews, Christians, and every other flavor of Messianic believers. Believing that the Messiah currently resides in some town in Rockland County while he prepares for a press conference not only diminishes the believer, it can get people killed. Rabbi Dockowicz may be a good man, but believing that he’s the Messiah is no less dangerous an idea for you and his followers than it was for the believers in Jim Jones and David Koresh. You have to separate your intellect from all the hurt and alienation and loneliness you feel in your heart. You have to think about what you believe, babe, because people most surely become what they believe.”

  “God is about faith, Mom, not intellect or comparisons to false prophets. The fact that I know that in my heart and you don’t is the reason I have to leave. You’re my mother, and I love you. I love Maxie. But God’s love and obedience to His will must come first.”

  “Right now you’re talking like you need a keeper more than a mother.”

  “You have no right to belittle my faith.”

  Jade drew in a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then slowly let it out. She felt nearly overwhelmed by sadness and a sense of loss, but she struggled to keep her emotions in check and think clearly, for she knew that the next words she uttered would be critical. This battle was clearly lost, and she needed more time if she were to have any hope of winning what she now saw would be a hard-fought war for her daughter’s intellect, soul, and future.

  “The bottom line is that you’re still fifteen years old,” Jade said in a firm, even tone. “In three years you’ll be of age and can do as you please. If you want to seal yourself off from the world in a town filled with fanatics who believe like you do, so be it. I’ll still think you’ve lost your mind, but I’ll accept your decision, and I’ll always love you. I’ll be most pleasantly surprised if the Kingdom of God is imminent, and when it’s ushered in by Rabbi Dockowicz you can say you told me so. In the meantime, until that happens or until you turn eighteen, you’ll do as I say. I hear your need and I feel your pain, and they have to be respected and dealt with. If you feel you want and need to transfer from Cairn High School to the school in Hebron Nablus, okay. It will probably cost you your Regents diploma, but that will be your worry. You will not go there for free. I will pay whatever tuition Rabbi Dockowicz and his people think is appropriate, and I will arrange for your transportation. But you’ll continue to live at home with Maxie and me. Take it or leave it, Fatima. That’s the deal I’m offering, and it’s also the end of this discussion.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Jade wheeled around and began walking back up the beach. Now she allowed her tears to flow freely, and she sobbed once. However, she did not want her son to see that she was upset, and so she was dry-eyed and once more in control of her emotions by the time she stepped off the beach onto her back lawn.

  Now it was time to talk to Max Jr. about his difficulties, perhaps once again try to persuade him to allow her to teach him a few simple lessons in self-defense. She could show him how to quickly bring to an end the string of abuse to which he was subjected daily, without causing serious injury to anyone, if only he would let her.

  Perhaps later, she thought, she would cry again when she was alone if the pain and anxiety she felt became too great, but she doubted it. The warrior in her she had thought retired forever was active once again, but this time on different missions than those she had undertaken in the past. This had been an eerie and unpleasant day, when haunts from her past had bled into her haunts of the present, but permitting herself the indulgence of more tears would serve no purpose whatsoever. Mom might have things to do and a lot on her mind, but her warrior would not permit self-pity.

  iv

  Jack Trex called later in the day.

  “It’s me, Jade.”

  “Hi, Jack. What’s happening with your boat?”

  “I’m not sure. Something funny is going on.”

  Jade gripped the telephone receiver a little tighter, but she did not allow her concern to be reflected in her voice. “How so? Did you call the Coast Guard?”

  “Yeah. I told them exactly what you told me to tell them, about how I was a commercial fisherman and needed my boat right away.”

  “Did you tell them about the metal box strapped to the carcass?”

  “Of course; that was the whole point of calling them in the first place. They said they’d get back to me.”

  “Did they?”

  “No. But the Coast Guard must have notified the Navy, because the Navy called the Cairn cops. The sons-of-bitches have quarantined my boat, Jade. They’ve got the whole marina cordoned off. The Navy asked the chief to put a guard on patrol all night. Some investigators from the Navy are supposed to come around to look at it in the morning, but that’s going to cost me another day. Damn. I need that boat, Jade. What do you think is going to happen?”

  Jade thought about it for a few moments, and then decided that the procedure seemed correct. From the fisherman’s description of the mine-laden carcass in his nets, the Coast Guard would have immediately recognized it as some kind of Navy funny business, and so they had promptly notified the Navy. The Navy, of course, would know exactly what the thing was. Not wanting to take a chance that the mine might be armed, accidentally or otherwise, they would have asked the local authorities to cordon off the area until they could assemble a team of demolition experts with the proper security clearance to check it all out and clean up the mess. If she were right about the carcass being part of an illegal operation, and she was certain she was, a number of heads were likely to be separated from the braid-decorated caps that currently sat on them.

  “Jade?”

  “It sounds kosher to me, Jack. You know what a pain in the ass it can be to deal with the bureaucracy. Take it from one who knows that if Naval investigators show up in the morning, and I believe they will, the Navy is moving with what for them is lightning speed. You’ll lose another day of fishing, but my guess is that they’ll have that thing off your boat and be out of your hair by afternoon. Estimate how much money you’re going to lose as a result of having your boat quarantined, add in what you lost today by coming in early to report that thing, throw in a couple of old market receipts to back you up, and bill them. Give your estimate to the investigators. It may take a few months, but it’s possible the Navy will reimburse you.

  “I’ll do that. Thanks, Jade.”

  “My pleasure. See you.”

  “See you.”

  Chapter Two

  i

  Detective Roy Mannes liked being a cop, which was why he was still on the job after putting in twenty years with the NYPD, then taking his pension from the city and joining the Cairn Police Department. Forty-six years old, he reasoned that keeping busy doing work he enjoyed was a good way of keeping at bay his personal demons, not the least of which was his alcoholism. During his career on the NYPD he’d suffered two broken marriages that had produced no children. He had a full head of prematurely gray hair that now matched his eyes, and his health had almost been shattered when he’d taken bullets in the back and spleen. But he had quit drinking six years before, and now took much better care of himself. He hoped he was on his way to feeling around forty-six instead of sixty-six.

  He’d lived in Cairn for the past eighteen years, commuting into New York thirty miles to the south when he’d worked there, and he knew the Cairn police chief, Jeffrey Bond, very well. Bond had immediately hired him when he’d asked for a job, and he had now worked for the Cairn Police Department for two a
nd a half years. When he compared the demands of his present job to the stresses of his career in New York, he sometimes felt as if he were stealing money. He considered Jeffrey Bond an excellent cop and a good administrator, sure to eventually be offered the top job in some larger community with a larger force. When that happened, Roy thought he might apply for the chief’s job himself. He was certain the town board would find him eminently qualified. He very much liked his life and job in Cairn.

  What he did not particularly care for was his present duty, which was essentially that of night watchman at the Cairn Marina. He had volunteered for the job because the Cairn force did not have the manpower to respond to special requests from the Navy, and placing a uniformed officer at the site would have meant disrupting the normal duty rotation and inconveniencing someone with a family. It wasn’t as if he had that much to do, essentially hang around until nine or ten in the morning when Navy investigators were scheduled to arrive while making certain that no pedestrians crossed the yellow police tape strung around the property and no transient boaters came into the marina from the river. He actually enjoyed being by the water at night, but he would still have preferred to be at the River Club in Nyack, hoisting a few non-alcoholic beers with his friends while regaling the younger cops and cocktail waitresses with war stories from his days as an NYPD detective working vice, homicide and narcotics.

  Roy took his foot off the railing of the elevated deck on which he had been leaning, thrust his hands into the pockets of his blue windbreaker and hunched his shoulders against the chill of the night air. He squinted against the harsh glare of the spotlight mounted on a stanchion a few feet to his left as he looked out into the shadows at the trawler with the netted, rotting carcass in its nets that was tied up at the end of one of the three long, floating docks that jutted out into the river from the marina. He frowned when he thought he detected movement on the boat, just a fleeting glimpse of what looked like the floating shape of a man’s head and shoulders silhouetted against the lights on the Westchester shore, but then he decided that it was only a chiaroscuro illusion, a trick played on his eyes by the combination of the bright lights around him, night, and shifting patterns of moonlight reflected off the moving water of the river. The marina had been sealed off before his arrival at ten o’clock, and nobody could have walked out on the dock without his noticing. He had already inspected the trawler at close range twice, but each time the smell of the decaying flesh hanging in the still air had caused him to retreat back to the seawall and elevated deck that anchored the floating docks.

  According to the chief, the Navy had been very close-mouthed about their interest in Jack Trex’s boat and his strange catch, and very explicit and forceful in requesting that the media not be notified. Roy could understand their nervousness. It seemed obvious to him that the metal box strapped to the carcass’s back was some kind of magnetic mine, which almost surely meant that the whole apparatus of fish and steel was the dead residue of some kind of secret government testing. But the mine had to be a dummy; if there were any chance that the device was armed, the Coast Guard or Navy would surely have already sent a demolitions team to immediately dismantle it He assumed that the military authorities knew the device was harmless, but had requested the quarantine and news blackout in an effort to keep the incident out of the newspapers. On the other hand, the Navy certainly didn’t seem to be in any hurry to whisk away the thing, which meant that he had to stay up all night just so the Navy investigators, who would probably be coming to Cairn from Connecticut, would not have to lose any sleep themselves.

  Roy started when he saw a cabin light go on in a twenty-five-foot power boat moored perhaps twenty yards off the bow of the trawler. He had been assured when he’d come on duty that all the boats in the marina had been checked to make certain there was nobody planning to spend the night aboard. It seemed one boat had been overlooked, or it had slipped into the marina and anchored earlier, perhaps while the policeman on duty was going to the toilet or inside the clubhouse getting a cup of coffee. Although Roy was fairly certain that the device on the creature’s back was not armed, he could not be absolutely certain, and that meant that the safety of whoever was on board the power boat was his responsibility. In hindsight, he realized that he should have rowed out in a dinghy and personally checked out all the boats himself instead of taking another man’s word that the boats were empty. The people in the boat were in a quarantined area, and they were going to have to leave.

  He was climbing down a ladder to the dinghy dock when the trawler exploded, lighting up the night sky with a blinding flash of light followed by a fireball of red, yellow and black. The force of the explosion knocked Roy off the ladder and into the water.

  ii

  Jade was abruptly awakened from shallow, troubled sleep by the roar of a not-too-distant explosion that sent a tremor through the house. She immediately knew what it was, and after the first waves of shock, horror and revulsion passed she was galvanized into action. She sprang out of bed and pulled on sweatpants, a heavy sweater and sneakers. In the aftermath of the explosion, a cacophony of sirens pierced the night as police, fire and emergency vehicles converged from all directions on the Cairn Marina.

  She looked in Fatima’s room, found her up and staring out the window at a reddish glow in the sky to the north.

  “Mom?! What’s happening?!”

  “I don’t know, babe. I’m going to find out. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  “Okay, Mom. Be careful.”

  Next she went to her son’s bedroom, found him sitting up in bed looking bewildered and anxious. Jade went over to the bed, wrapped her arms around the boy and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Mom …?”

  “Everything’s all right, my big tub of toasted tuna. I have to go out. Mom’s got things to do.”

  “Are you going to be gone long?”

  “I don’t know, Maxie,” Jade said quickly, heading for the door. “Don’t worry.”

  The wheels of her Jeep spun in the gravel driveway as she backed out into the street. She slammed the gearshift into forward and raced along the river road toward the marina.

  The explosion, she thought, had to have been caused by the thing aboard Jack Trex’s trawler; her own judgment and that of the Coast Guard and Navy notwithstanding, the device had been armed. But something else also puzzled her; the force of the explosion that had shaken her house had been many times what would normally have been generated by the relatively small magnetic mine she had seen. She found the idea of the Navy attaching such a powerful explosive to something as unreliable as a Jolly Roger incomprehensible. Ship traffic in the Long Island Sound, where the creature must have been released, was very congested, and here in the Hudson, if Jack Trex had not netted the carcass, the explosive device could have sunk a barge or tanker, or killed hundreds of people aboard a passenger cruiser like The Commander or Island Princess. It was sheer insanity.

  The police had set up barriers in the streets leading to the marina, but an officer recognized her and waved her through. She left her car in the parking lot, and then ran down to the elevated deck where Jeffrey Bond was conferring with a uniformed police officer and two firemen. Her first glimpse of the devastation in the marina confirmed her suspicion that the explosion she had heard and felt had not been caused by any ordinary sea mine. The damage wrought by the explosion was enormous. Jack Trex’s trawler was completely gone, along with twenty-five yards of the floating dock to which it had been tied. Wreckage from what appeared to be three or four other boats was bobbing in the water, and one ketch moored almost forty yards away had been demasted.

  Off to her right two paramedics were attending to a gray-haired man in a blue windbreaker who appeared to have fallen into the water. Jade nodded to Jeffrey Bond, then headed in the direction of the fallen man as she stared out over the river, squinting against the glare of the bright lights all around her as she scanned the artificial horizon formed by the shore lights in Westchester, searc
hing for the outline of the heavily muffled power boat she suspected was out there someplace running at high speed with its lights out.

  Out in the deep channel there was a brightly lighted tugboat pulling a barge northward, and she abruptly stopped walking and leaned on the damaged railing of the deck, staring even harder when she thought she detected a dark shape moving across the backdrop of lights. Then the shape was gone, and she could not be certain there had been anything there in the first place; but if there was a boat on the river speeding away with its lights out, it almost certainly meant there were people in the U.S. Navy guilty of much more than just criminal stupidity.

  She continued along the deck to where the man in the blue windbreaker, who she could now see was wearing a detective’s badge, was being attended to. The man had been lying on his back, but he was sitting up now, clutching a blanket the paramedics had wrapped around him. The thick gray hair on the left side of his head was matted with blood. He appeared to be in shock, and his dazed expression reflected horror and disbelief. His gray eyes fixed on her as she approached. His mouth opened and closed as if he wanted to speak, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I have paramedic training, Tim,” Jade said to one of the two young men kneeling beside the fallen detective. “Tell me how I can help. Is there anyone else hurt?”

  The boyish-faced paramedic ran a hand back through his shoulder-length brown hair, and then shook his head. “No. We’re okay here, Jade. Thank God the cops had the place cordoned off. Roy here seems to be the only casualty.”

  “No,” the detective said in a hollow, hoarse voice that cracked. He glanced anxiously back and forth between Jade and the two paramedics, horror swimming in his eyes. “Not true. Somebody else … others in a white cruiser moored near the trawler. Got to warn them. Tell them to leave.”