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It was a beautiful sunny day on the resort island of Martha’s Vineyard when death came knocking at the door.
The man who opened it was thinking about all the things he and his family planned to do on their vacation: Go to the beach. Ride bicycles. Eat seafood dinners. Shop for souvenirs and antiques.
Not knowing that they only had a handful of minutes left to live.
The first blow from the intruder was so unexpected that he didn’t even have time to be afraid. He was more surprised than scared. But then there was a second blow and then another and another.
“Why?” he screamed out.
There was no answer – only darkness.
Then the killer moved through the rooms – doing the same thing to the man’s wife, his two daughters and infant son.
Five people dead.
But the nightmare wasn’t over yet.
There was more death to come on this island.
Much more…
My decision to become a police officer was actually made on my fifth birthday.
That year my parents gave me a tiny police outfit as a present – toy gun, badge, hat. There is a picture I still have of me mugging for the camera dressed like that. “Little Abby Pearce,” people used to say. “Isn’t she cute? One day though she’ll outgrow all that and decide what she really wants to do with her life.”
Except I never did.
In school, all the other girls dreamed of growing up to be Hillary Clinton or Serena Williams or Madonna.
Me, I wanted to be Cagney or Lacey.
I graduated from the Police Academy in New York City, I got a degree in criminal justice from Baruch University, I joined the NYPD as a policewoman and later became a homicide detective – breaking a lot of big cases during my time there on the force.
And then – for reasons too complex to get into right now (hell, I’m not sure I even understand them myself) – I returned to my hometown on the resort island of Martha’s Vineyard to become a detective with the tiny Cedar Cliffs, Mass. police force.
Which is how I wound up sitting here now on this day in early fall talking with Meg Jarvis about how I’d solved the big roadside-sign caper case. Meg was the administrative assistant to the chief of the Cedar Cliffs force – and she’d worked there for like a million years. I, like others on the force, turned to Meg for comfort and guidance on a lot of things. Professional stuff, sure. But personal too.
“So it turned out to be a bunch of kids stealing the signs?” Meg asked.
“Homesick kids,” I said.
In the past few weeks, as kids started heading back to school after the summer, a number of street signs had gone missing throughout Cedar Cliffs and also in towns on other parts of the island. Since the signs weren’t worth very much – and presumably had little or no resale value – there had to be another motive for whoever was taking them.
And I found it.
“It wasn’t a crime at all,” I said. “Well, not really. Some kids from here going off to college wanted to bring a few things with them to remember the island. That’s what I meant about homesick. What better way than to feel like you’re almost home than to have a street sign from home in your dorm room? Something that says Beach Street or Ocean Avenue makes you think about the ocean and Martha’s Vineyard again. At least that’s what the kids told me when I confronted them about it.”
“How did you figure it out, Abby?”
“Hey, I’m a detective. I get paid to figure out mysteries.”
“What happened to the kids?”
“I reported them to their parents – and put back the stolen signs.”
“You could have arrested them.”
“For what?”
“Theft.”
“Oh, c’mon, would you have done that?”
“No, I guess not.” She shook her head. “This is quite a comedown for you though. Not long ago, you were on the front pages and all over TV news for catching murderers and sex abusers. Now you’re back to bringing street-sign stealers to justice.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
I’d recently been investigating the disappearance of Samantha Claymore, the sixteen-year-old heiress to the Claymore Cosmetics fortune, and I uncovered a series of murders and sexual crimes against teenage girls in the process of getting Samantha home safely. Like Meg said, that case had turned me into a media sensation for a while.
But now I was back investigating the ordinary day-to-day crimes that happened in a place like Martha’s Vineyard. Stuff like stolen bikes, traffic violations, loud beach parties and squabbles between neighbors. Even something as common in other places as car theft rarely happened here. I mean how do you get a stolen car off the island? You’d have to buy a ferry ticket for it.
It was fall in Cedar Cliffs now, which meant that in a few weeks the number of people on the island – and, hence, the amount of potential crime – would decrease dramatically. The high point of the tourist season here was in August when the number of people on the island soared. But there was still pretty good tourist traffic in the weeks after Labor Day, and some people said this time in the early fall was the best time of the year to be on Martha’s Vineyard. I was one of them. I always loved the fall here.
I was really taking advantage of the beautiful weather. Last week – after a series of sailing lessons – I took my first solo sail out into the open sea, making it to Woods Hole on Cape Cod and back. I also was doing a lot of bike riding, taking in the fall beauty on all the bike lanes and trails that criss-crossed the island. There was still swimming too. The ocean water on Martha’s Vineyard remained warm and comfortable in the early fall, and there was a secluded beach not far from where I lived. I spent a lot of my free time there.
Yep, it was all very comfortable for me.
Except for the fact that I was doing all these things alone.
It would have been nice to share it with someone.
A point Meg Jarvis brought up with me now.
“How’s everything else going for you?” Meg asked.
“Such as?”
“Your personal life.”
“Are you talking about men?”
“Yes.”
“Oscar’s fine.”
“Oscar’s your dog.”
“Well, he’s also the only man in my life right now.”
“What happened to the Boston TV reporter?”
That was a good question. A question I did not have a good answer for. Lincoln Connor and I became involved romantically when he came here to cover the murders/teenage sex scandal for his station in Boston. Things were exciting between us for a while. But then he went back to Boston. Which was why I was spending most of my free time with Oscar now.
“Lincoln wanted me to move to Boston,” I said. “He said I should try to get a job with the Boston police or maybe the FBI there. I asked him to move to Martha’s Vineyard. I said maybe he could get a job with the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette. We argued about that a number of times, and then he left. I’m not sure if I’ll ever see him again.”
“It’s not that far for you to visit him in Boston,” Meg pointed out.
“It’s not that far for him to visit me here either. But neither one seems to be happening.”
“Do you love him?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s really supposed to be a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.”
“I may still be in love with my ex-husband.”
“Zach? The state trooper back in New York?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think there’s a chance you and Zach could get back together again?”
“I was hoping.”
“But didn’t he just get remarried?”
“Well, there is that…”
It was just another routine day in the Cedar Cliffs police station. Talking about petty crimes on Martha’s Vineyard and personal gossip and a lot of other stuff like that. Then Police Chief Barry Wilhelm came barreling out of his office. And in an instant everything changed.
“There’s been a homicide at The Beach House,” he yelled to me.
“Who’s dead?”
“Five people!”
“Five?”
“It looks like a massacre up there!”
I knew this was going to be really terrible. I could see it on the faces of the two uniformed Cedar Cliffs officers standing outside. It wasn’t just that the two cops looked horrified or distraught or even repulsed by what they’d seen inside. The expression on their faces was more of… well, disbelief.
The Beach House was a very upscale hotel about a mile outside of downtown Cedar Cliffs. It was on its own little parcel of land, right off of Beach Road on the eastern end of the island. There was a pricy restaurant attached to it, and a big parking lot in front.
“Tell me what you know,” I said to Josh Gruber, one of the two cops. He was a young guy who’d just joined the force recently.
“Five people dead in there, Abby. Husband. Wife. And three kids. They were all stabbed. A lot of times. My God, there’s blood everywhere inside there.”
I could see Gruber was desperately trying to keep it together.
“Do we know who they are?”
“His name is Thomas Lavelle. A doctor from New York City who came up here with his family on vacation. I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean I never saw so much blood…”
Gruber lost control now. He suddenly turned pale, bent down and began to vomit next to one of the police cars in the parking lot. I stood in front of him as best I could in hopes that the curious onlookers who’d showed up wouldn’t see what he was doing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, once it was over.
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“I’m a cop, I should be able to deal with something like this.”
“You’re also a human being, Josh.”
Looking at him there, trying desperately to keep his composure and act tough again, the way he knew he was supposed to at a crime scene, I remembered another young police officer who once experienced the same thing.
Me.
During my first year on the NYPD force, I became violently ill like that at a particularly gruesome murder scene. It was the only time that ever happened to me. You never get used to the violence and death you have to deal with as a police officer, but you somehow learn to accept it as part of the job.
“It’s okay, Josh,” I said softly to Gruber now. “It’s okay.”
Then I went inside…
Thomas Lavelle was lying on the living room floor, covered in blood. He’d been stabbed numerous times. He was on his back and his eyes were wide open, staring at nothing as we looked down at the body. His shirt, his pants, his face – even his shoes – were covered in blood. It was impossible to know which wounds had come first. Only that the attack seemed to have been carried out in a rage, not a professional kill.
His wife’s body was in a hallway leading off the living room. It looked like she was trying to get away from whoever attacked her husband. She had only been stabbed once, but it was a lethal blow to her heart that must have killed her instantly. Like her husband, she was lying on her back.
But her hands were clasped together in front of her, which was eerie looking.
Almost like she was praying in death.
I wondered if that was significant – or simply the way she happened to fall after the fatal stab wounds.
Two of the children – young girls, one who looked to be in her early teens and the other a few years younger – were in a bedroom. Like their father, they had been stabbed numerous times. And the third child, a little boy who was still really an infant, was killed in his playpen. The tiny boy couldn’t have been more than a year or so old.
There was more too.
Whoever did all this had left a horrifying message behind.
On a wall in the hallway, someone had written in blood – presumably the victims’ blood – these words:
No One Here Gets Out Alive
Teena Morelli, the other detective on the Cedar Cliffs police force, was already there. She and I listened to Dave Bowers, one of the first officers on the scene, talk about what we knew so far about the murders. Which wasn’t much.
“The time of death is estimated at some time yesterday afternoon,” Bowers said. “No one heard anything, but at that time of the afternoon most people staying here were probably out at the beach or somewhere else. No sign of forced entry, but then a lot of people just leave their doors unlocked on Martha’s Vineyard. It is supposed to be a safe place.”
“Who found the bodies?” I asked.
“The maid. When she showed up to clean the place this morning.”
‘What about the murder weapon?” I asked.
“Nothing here. From the wounds, it looks like it could have been a very large knife. Something like a hunting knife. But the killer, or killers, must have taken the weapon with them.”
“So all we have to do is find someone walking around with a bloody hunting knife and arrest them,” Teena grunted. “That should be easy, Pearce. Especially for a hotshot detective like you.”
Teena was trying to act like she was tough, which she usually did. But I could tell she was really shaken up by it. Different people react to something like this in different ways. Josh Gruber threw up behind a police car. Teena made jokes.
“Any idea of a motive?” I asked Bowers.
“Nothing seems to be missing. So it doesn’t look like a robbery.”
“What do we know about Lavelle?”
“He was a cardiologist in New York. Very prominent doctor. He apparently had a lot of high-profile patients.”
I knew I’d need to do a lot of digging into Lavelle’s background. The motive for a massacre of him and his family was most likely something from his past in New York City. I didn’t figure he brought his family to Martha’s Vineyard on vacation and then pissed off someone here so much that they did this. No, the odds were this was something, or someone, that had followed him here.
“And I assume there are no witnesses at all?” I asked.
“Just one,” Bowers said.
“Who?”
“The girl.”
“What girl?”
“The Lavelles’ oldest daughter, Karin.”
“She survived?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty unbelievable! She was found in the middle of the bloodbath. She’s the only survivor… and she wasn’t hurt at all.”
Karin Lavelle looked pretty much like a typical fifteen-year-old girl. Long brown hair, dressed in jeans and a Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt, with a wooden Native-American necklace of some kind that looked like she’d bought it on a trip to one of the stores that sell that kind of thing in Aquinnah on the western end of the island. Yep, your average teenage girl. Except her entire family just got wiped out.
So why not her too?
The officers had taken her away from the crime scene – where the bodies of her family were – and moved her into the manager’s office where medical people had done a preliminary examination of her and found nothing wrong. Nothing physically wrong, that is.
“What has she said?” I asked Bowers.
“Nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s been unresponsive, almost catatonic. All we could get out of her is that she doesn’t know what happened. Doesn’t know who did anything here or why. Doesn’t know anything, she says.”
“Do you think she’s telling the truth?”
“Why would she lie?”
“To protect herself.”
“Are you saying she’s a suspect?”
“Well, she’s the only one we’ve got at the moment.”
I looked over at Karin Lavelle now. She was sitting in a chair behind the manager’s desk. Even though the temperature was in the eighties outside, she seemed to be shivering and someone had put a blanket around her. They’d also given her a cup of something to drink, but the cup sat untouched in front of her.
“No way that little girl could have done what we saw back there,” Bowers said. “Overpowered her father and her mother and the rest of her family—”
“Then why is she still alive?”
“Do you really think she did it?”
“I just don’t know,” I said to Bowers.
The manager of The Beach House walked over to me. Lily Knowlton was a strange-looking, almost scary woman – dressed completely in black, with tattoos and body jewelry.
“Are you with the police?” she asked me.
“I’m Abby Pearce, the lead detective investigating this case.”
“You don’t look much like a detective to me.”
“What do I look like?”
“I don’t know. More like a, well… like a stewardess or something.”
That was a new one. Many people have said when they first met me that I didn’t match their idea of the way a cop was supposed to look. I wasn’t a big woman. Just average size, maybe even petite at five feet five and around a hundred and five pounds. I have long black hair. Usually I wear it in a ponytail or in a bun held up in the back with a plastic hair pin, but today I’d let it fall loose down my back. Most of the time people figured me at first for a businesswoman or a real estate broker or maybe even a lawyer. But a stewardess? I didn’t even think anyone called women who work on airlines stewardesses anymore – they were all flight attendants. Of course, I could have told Lily Knowlton she didn’t look much like a hotel manager, but I didn’t.
“Tell me what you know about what happened here,” I said.
“All I know is a lot of police suddenly showed up and said there were people dead in one of our rooms. And now you’re all here with this girl taking over my office. That’s all I know.”
It didn’t seem like Lily Knowlton was going to be of much help.
“I need to be able to use my office again to do my job,” she said. “I need to get back to my desk.”
“You’re going to have to wait until we finish talking to this girl."
