“Here every day,” he says. “Great to meet you.” He wipes his hand on his jeans and offers it to me, a strong grip when I shake it.
“Likewise,” I say. “So you’re the guy who hasn’t raised prices in a decade.”
“Yep, yeah, that’s right.” He makes eye contact with me, holds it for maybe one meaningful beat longer than normal, but then breaks it off. A shy one. Not a slickster. I like the shy, awkward ones. Why do I always pick the jerks to date instead?
No ring on his finger, either. A girl always looks.
“Well,” he says, clapping his hands, “nice meeting you, and enjoy your food.”
“I will,” I say as he walks away. “I will.”
“I know, right?” Ricketts laughs. “Now you know why it’s my favorite place.”
The scallops are the best I’ve ever had, cooked just perfectly, a touch of butter and lemon but not overplaying it, letting the seafood speak for itself. The fries are nicely seasoned and the creamy garlic sauce accompanying them is enough to make me change religions. We top it all off with a second round of beer, but I’ll stop there.
“Okay,” I say, now that we’ve gotten a peek at the hunky owner of this place, I’ve dispensed my advice, and I’ve had some of the best seafood I’ve ever eaten. “Now it’s time to ruin my appetite.”
“It will,” she says. “It definitely will.”
50
“OKAY, HERE.” RICKETTS removes a piece of paper from her file folder. “Eight victims over the last decade. All unsolved.”
“I know about the ones last year, summer of 2011,” I say. “Zach and Melanie, Bonnie Stamos, my uncle. Let’s start with the older ones, before I came here.”
“Good,” she says. “That’s what I did.”
“Dede Paris,” I say, reading the first name. “Last seen May 9, 2007.”
“The first two go together,” says Ricketts. “Dede Paris and Annie Church. Yale sophomores. May ninth was when they left New Haven that summer. They lied to their friends and family about how they were spending their summer. They came here to the Hamptons. That was discovered later, through cell phone records and then their car, which was ultimately found in Montauk after a lengthy search.”
She removes two photos from her file folder and hands them to me. “Dede is the blonde, Annie the brunette.”
Dede’s photograph is from a volleyball game. She’s tall and athletic, with blond hair cropped tight against her head. The photo of Annie is a school photo, probably from high school, a bright smile and warm eyes, her hair past her shoulders, reddish brown.
“So they were killed in Montauk?” I ask.
Ricketts shrugs. “Nobody knows. That’s where their car was found. Their bodies were never found. Or, I should say, most of their bodies was never found.”
I look at the document she typed, organized and professional. “Her finger,” I say, reading her one-line summary for Dede.
“Yeah, they found one of Dede’s fingers in the woods near Montauk, two years after they disappeared. We always assumed foul play but didn’t know it until somebody’s dog found the finger. Then they got a DNA match.”
So they were killed in 2007, and a single finger was found in 2009. Two years, and nobody found it. Well, that’s possible, sure, but …
“Tell me about the finger,” I say. “Was it decomposed? Was there anything distinctive about it?”
“No and yes.” She opens her folder again and shows me a photograph of the finger. “Not decomposed much at all, well preserved, with a ring on it—a class ring from … Santa Monica High School, if I’m reading that right.”
“Okay,” I say, handing her back the photo. She slides it into her folder. “So after that, we have the third one … Brittany Halsted,” I say. “July 2008.”
“Prostitute,” says Ricketts. She hands me another photo. A mug shot. Oh, she’s young, not more than eighteen or nineteen in this photo. She is thin, blond, attractive but with a beat-up look about her that most working girls have.
“She used the name Barbie on the street,” says Ricketts. “Last seen alive getting on the back of a motorcycle outside a nightclub in Shirley. She told her friends she was going to be gone for the night.”
The whole night. Smart of him. Nobody would be expecting her back. It would give the offender some time before anyone would be looking for her.
“Last seen alive,” I say. “So they found her.”
“They found Brittany.” She hands me another photograph. “A couple of miles down Sunrise Highway from where she was picked up on the motorcycle.”
She is lying facedown in a bed of leaves, her head turned toward the camera, her eyes shut. She has the ghostly mannequin look of a corpse dead for at least a couple of days. A pool of blood surrounds the lower half of her body.
“This photo doesn’t show it,” says Ricketts. “But he carved her up. He disemboweled her. The ME thought he used a corkscrew.”