Page 67 of The First Gentleman

63

Litchfield, Connecticut

Ismash the burner phone and toss the parts into a drainage pond—and accidentally drop my own phone in with it.

“Shit!” I fish my phone out and power it down, knowing I won’t be able to dry it out until I get home.

At the farmhouse, I sit in the living room with the lights off and drapes pulled shut. If I had a gun, it would definitely be loaded and on my lap right now. I’m wishing I’d bought one in New Hampshire. Every few minutes, I get up to peek through the drapes, hoping to see the headlights of Garrett’s rental car.

Hoping I don’t see anybody else.

I stare at my dark phone sitting in a tub of rice. Screw it. I press the button and the Apple symbol glows as the phone comes back to life.

I have one voicemail from Garrett: “Brea! Call me!” He sounds nervous. Excited.

I also have half a dozen texts from him. And another one from an unknown caller.

The danger is getting deeper. Stop now.

A Brother

A chill runs down my body all the way to my feet.

That does it. I’m calling Garrett.

He picks up on the first ring. “Brea! Why haven’t you been answering your phone? I have to tell you about a meeting I just had at an airport near Hanover. I don’t want to talk about it over the phone except to say that it was with the subject of our investigation.”

“How is that possible?” I ask.And what does this mean?

“Let’s do a rendezvous,” says Garrett. “Meet me at our place.”

CHAPTER

64

Seabrook, New Hampshire

As the night deepens, Detective Sergeant Marie Gagnon leans on the Reverend Bonus Weare memorial rock. She’s wondering what his sermon on this spot was about. Brotherly love? Do unto others? Thou shalt not kill?

Forty feet away, under a battery of lights, a small backhoe is excavating a section of loose soil. The forensics team wanted to wait until morning, but Gagnon pulled rank. If this really is Suzanne Bonanno’s grave, it’s already been disturbed once.

She wanted the area secured and searched pronto.

Gagnon is usually not big on anonymous tips, but there’s a lot about this case that doesn’t fit normal patterns. She and a couple uniforms found the spot the caller had pinpointed, and they could see it had been dug up recently. That’s when she mobilized the crime scene team.

A few yards from the rock, two state police investigators in white coveralls gently sift the excavated dirt through screens. Vicki Barnes from MCU is documenting the whole process withher camera. Seabrook cops poke through the bushes with flashlights looking for anything that doesn’t belong.

Gagnon looks up as a tall man in khaki pants and a plaid shirt lopes up the path toward the site. One of the cops steps forward to stop him.

“It’s okay,” Gagnon calls out. “He’s with me.”

It’s not every night that a deputy attorney general shows up at a crime scene dig, but Hugh Bastinelli lives just twenty minutes away, and Gagnon gave him a call. She figured he’d be interested.

“I know this spot,” Bastinelli says as she waves him over. “I hike here on the weekends. I’ve taken selfies with my kids in front of this rock!”

“I checked the municipal records,” says Gagnon. “The summer she went missing, this part of the park was closed for renovation and regrading. The ground was all torn up. Wouldn’t have been hard to make a fresh grave seem like part of the work.” She points to the backhoe. “When the foliage was replanted, the site over there was pretty much hidden.”

Bastinelli looks at the members of the forensics team, hard at work. “Have they found anything useful?”

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