The Borzoi Killings

29.

Kathy Schiavoni for years had spent vast amounts of time driving on virtually every road in East Hampton and Montauk. She knew this was the activity of a lonely person. She liked her solitude and loved walking on the gorgeous beaches that stretched for miles from Montauk to Southampton. She also particularly loved the two-lane, twisting roads, once horse and cattle paths, that led north and south off the Montauk Highway. Those narrow roads went through farmland toward the Atlantic. They were the arteries of this region, her home territory. Especially in Montauk, the air of the East End had that incandescent haze that radiated up from the Atlantic. The ocean was on both sides of the steadily narrowing peninsula that finally ended at the Montauk Lighthouse.

At night her headlights glowed in the ground fog, the eleven-foot-tall reeds gleaming at the edges of the roadside. She knew exactly where Raquel Rematti’s house was. The house had been there for so long that it was almost an integral part of the landscape-a small seaside structure with faded wood, a shingled roof, and a deck overlooking the beach, just above the reedy dunes.

The house was at the end of a beach road that, for several hundred yards, was a compound of hard sand. There was a light on in the kitchen next to the deck. There were no other lights. In the fog, the single light was diffuse, soft, haloed. She wasn’t certain anyone was in the house until she saw the two cars parked near a high bank of reeds: a BMW and a Mercedes.

Clutching a manila envelope close to her chest to keep it dry, Kathy climbed the long flight of worn wooden steps. There was an odor of salt water in the air. When she saw the black expanse of the Atlantic, she acknowledged to herself, as she had many times, that she wished she lived in a house exactly like this, rooted in a place that seemed almost a part of the shoreline and the ocean itself. She craved absolute, comforting solitude, each morning a renewal of life as the sun rose from the ocean and shed light on one of the easternmost areas of the country.

After Kathy knocked, Raquel was casual and unafraid even though she was in an isolated world. Raquel Rematti came to the sliding door on the deck. Although she had seen Kathy in the courtroom several times, she had no reason to know who she was: the gallery was crowded every day for the trial of Juan the Knife and this woman could have been a spectator or a reporter.

Without hesitating, Raquel slid the glass door open for this stranger. “Can I help you?”

Kathy said, “Ms. Rematti, I work for the Suffolk County DA. In the forensics lab. I need to talk to you.”

“Come in.”