by James Hayman
“Jolley and his wife are the caretakers,” said Maggie.
“Any communications between them in the last twenty-four hours?” asked McCabe.
“Quite a lot there too,” said Brian Cleary. “The most interesting are the last ones. At 10:52, when we know they were probably both on the island, she texts him, ‘Meet you in 15 u know where.’ He texts back, ‘Gotcha.’ Then nothing until 1:41, when he texted, ‘How could I have been such a jerk? I’m so sorry. We need to talk. Please meet me by my boat. I love you.’ She texted back, ‘OMW.’ ”
“OMW?” Fortier looked puzzled.
“Kids texting abbreviation,” Maggie explained. “Means ‘On my way.’ ”
“I wonder what he was apologizing for? Kind of sounds like they had a fight and he wants to make up. Anything else?”
“After that, just the final text he sent to his wife,” said Cleary. “The so-called suicide note. At least one scenario of what happened here seems pretty obvious to me.”
“Really?” said McCabe. “Well, maybe you can enlighten the rest of us.”
“Since they were on the island, I’d say they went to the studio to do their thing. In her texts, she was always saying how it was her favorite place and she wished that they could be together there. So they go, but when they get there, they have a fight. About what? Who knows. What do lovers fight about? Something he said. Something he didn’t say. His sex technique? Hers? Maybe she’s pissed because she didn’t have an orgasm. Maybe she wants to do it again and he doesn’t. Maybe she wants him to leave his wife and he says no. Since they’re both dead, we’ll never know. Point is, they have a fight. During which he says something that hurts her and storms out.”
“Lot of suppositions there,” said McCabe.
“Just hear me out. Knowles storms out, but as he heads to his boat, he’s horrified by the nasty things he’s said. He needs to apologize. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he sends in a text from his boat. ‘How could I have been such a jerk?’ Followed by a plea to make up. ‘I love you.’ To which Aimée responded, not by telling him she’s sorry too but rather, ‘On my way.’ Maybe she’s still pissed and hasn’t finished telling him off. So when she gets there, she starts the fight up all over again. Maybe she threatens to tell her father about the affair. Or the police. He knows if she does that it’ll cost him. Not just his marriage but also his job and possibly even jail time. He panics and knocks her down. She hits her head against a rock or maybe the back of the boat and starts bleeding. She tries to hit back. He panics. Sees his future going down the drain. Grabs a knife.”
“Aha,” said McCabe, “the handy knife.”
“C’mon, McCabe, this is a fishing boat. It’s next to certain there’s at least a gutting knife on board. He grabs it as she comes for him. In the melee he stabs her. Or maybe she just runs into the knife and it really is an accident. He pulls out the knife. She falls down, not dead but dying from the wound. Knowles realizes that if anyone finds out what he’s done, he won’t just do a year in the county jail for screwing a student, he’ll most likely spend the rest of his life in prison for killing one. Or at least a lot of years for stabbing and wounding one.
“That means he can’t leave her where she is. He’s got to get the hell out of there before anyone sees them. He starts up the boat and heads back to Portland. He thinks about throwing her body overboard but she isn’t dead yet, so he can’t bring himself to do it.
“He convinces himself that if he hides the body up by the Loring, he can tell the police she asked for a ride to her mother’s place and he dropped her off as near as he could. He’ll tell them the last he saw of her, she was climbing up the Loring Trail to head for home.
“He thinks maybe it’ll all be blamed on some random rapist who just happened to be on the prowl. If they find his DNA on her body, he can admit to consensual sex. He leaves her there, gets back in the boat and starts for home. On the way, he has a real Oh my God moment. Twenty-four hours ago he was an upstanding father and a respected teacher. Now he’s nothing but a murderer. He’s overcome by guilt and self-loathing. Decides he can’t live with himself. He texts the suicide note and dives overboard. He drowns and his body washes up at Two Lights. There you have it. Means. Motive. Opportunity. Q.E.D.”
“Q.E.D.? What the hell’s that?” asked Fortier. “More of that texting stuff?”
“No,” said McCabe, “it’s Latin for Quod Erat Demonstrandum, which means ‘thus it is demonstrated.’ ”
“Jesus, Brian, where the hell did you learn Latin? Your old man make you go to church?”
“Nah. I picked it up on an episode of one of those new Sherlock Holmes shows. Holmes says ‘Q.E.D.’ to Watson after proving a point. Only the Watson on this show is a cute girl. I thought it was kind of cool.” Cleary looked pleased with himself. “Now if you all will just admit I’m right about all this, we can wrap it up and I won’t have to miss tonight’s Sox-Yankees game. I planned to meet up with a couple of buddies at Rivalries to watch it.” Rivalries was a popular sports bar on Cotton Street in Portland.
McCabe sighed. “Sorry, Brian, you better let your pals know you won’t be making it.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“I mean I think there may be a few holes in your theory.”
“Such as?”
“Well, for starters, you’ve got too many what-ifs and not enough facts. What if they had a fight. What if she texted OMW because she wanted to yell at him some more. What if she falls and bashes her head. C’mon, I know it’s a big game, but you know as well as I do that any defense attorney would tell any judge this is all just random speculation on your part. Any or all of it might be exactly how it happened, but it’s just as likely that it’s not. There’s no way you can prove it. Which means if Knowles were alive, there’d be no way you could convict him of anything other than having sex with a student, which at least we have some hard evidence for but frankly isn’t the main issue here.”
Cleary looked crestfallen. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. What some might consider gaping holes in your solution.”
“Such as?”
“Such as why in hell would a panicked or maybe guilt-ridden Byron Knowles take x minutes to carve an A in her chest? You’ve suggested no reason, and I can’t imagine any unless it’s some weird reference to a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. Then there’s the question of her cell phone. Why on earth would Knowles leave her cell phone with all its sexy text messages lying ten feet from her body? If he wants to hide the sexual relationship, especially if he wants to hide what you called the Fifty Shades of Grey stuff, no way he’d leave it there. All it does is implicate him. Especially when his last message to his wife was ‘Please know that I have always loved you.’ I mean if you were him, wouldn’t you want to hide the dirty things you were doing and not have them become part of the official record?”
“There’s one possible reason he might have left it,” said Maggie.
“Okay, what’s that?”
“If he had to leave in a hurry. If he heard Scott’s dog charging up the trail with Scott not so far behind, he might have just dropped it and run like hell.”
“Okay, that’s a definite maybe,” said McCabe. “But what about this? We know Aimée was still alive when Scott found her. She was breathing. She had a pulse. If Knowles didn’t want her to die, why would he drag her body a hundred feet up a rough incline and then hide her in some brambles where she was so hard to find it took a dog to actually sniff her out? Not to mention the fact that he didn’t bother calling 911 for an ambulance to come and help her?”
Cleary shrugged. “Because he’s no doctor. He thought she was dead and, like I said, he thinks a rapist/murderer would try to hide the body, so that’s what he does. As for the phone, maybe Maggie’s right. He panicked when he heard Ruthie and Scott approaching and just forgot to take it.”
“Yeah, maybe. But it’s equally possible that Knowles didn’t kill anyone. Not Aimée. Not himself. They may have both been the victi
ms of a third man. An unsub who wants all us cops to believe the scenario you just laid out. I don’t think we can do that till we know a whole lot more.”
“Me either,” said Maggie. “Especially not after spending an hour with his wife. Gina Knowles is an angry and bitter woman, which she has every right to be. But she still couldn’t imagine Knowles being capable of murder.”
“If there is a third man,” said McCabe, “he probably used Knowles’s cell phone to send the text that lured Aimée to Knowles’s boat. Which means A, the bad guy was on the island at the time, and B, based on the content of the text, he somehow knew that Knowles and Aimée had just had a fight or a disagreement or something else that Knowles felt he had to apologize about. It’s like the bad guy had the damned studio bugged.”
“Or that Knowles really is the killer,” said Cleary.
“Or that,” said McCabe.
“So where does all that leave us, folks?” asked Bill Fortier.
“Looking for an alternative killer,” said Maggie. “At this point we don’t have a clue as to who that might be. Though I guess we can be pretty sure it wasn’t Dean Scott.”
Fortier shook his head and sighed. “Why couldn’t one of these, just for once, be easy?”
“Hey, come on, Bill, cheer up,” said McCabe. “We only found the body seven hours ago. We’re just getting started.”
Fortier’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened. Then hung up without a word. “Shockley’s going public in exactly three minutes,” he told the detectives. “Downstairs in the big briefing room. You guys wanna go down and watch the show live?”
Maggie watched a pair of frown lines appear between McCabe’s eyes.
“No, thanks,” he said. “You go if you want. I think I’ll just watch it from up here.” He didn’t want to answer any questions thrown at him as the lead detective, but he wanted to see how much information Shockley was going to give out. Shockley was better at the PR stuff than he was anyway.
Fortier nodded. “Okay. Why don’t we all watch it from here?” He flipped on the TV in the corner and clicked to the local NBC affiliate. The face of Shockley’s girlfriend, on-air reporter Josie Tenant, filled one half the screen. An empty rostrum filled the other.
“And here he is now,” said Tenant. “Portland Police Chief Thomas Shockley.” The cameras turned to Shockley, in full dress uniform, striding across the stage. He took his place at the rostrum, a serious no-bullshit expression on his face. The chief took a few seconds for the chatter to die down and then began to speak.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, early this morning, at approximately 3:20 a.m., the severely wounded body of a young woman was discovered just off the Loring Trail in Portland by Dr. Dean Scott of Portland. Dr. Scott, who had been jogging nearby, is a resident in emergency medicine at Cumberland Medical Center. In spite of his best efforts to save her life, the young woman died of her wounds just a few minutes later. She has since been identified as Veronica Aimée Whitby. Aimée, as she was known to practically everyone, is the daughter of one of Maine’s most prominent business leaders, Edward Whitby, president and board chairman of Whitby Engineering & Development. Her mother, Tracy Carlin, is a journalist with the Portland Press Herald and a colleague of many of you in attendance here today. I know you all share, as I do, the profound grief that Mr. Whitby and Ms. Carlin must be feeling over the tragic slaying of their daughter. The motive behind the killing is, at this time, unclear, but there is a definite possibility that Aimée Whitby was raped before she was killed.
“Several hours after the discovery of the victim’s body, another body, that of Penfield Academy English teacher Byron Knowles, of South Portland, washed up near Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth. Mr. Knowles was the father of a four-year-old girl, and his wife is expecting another child in the very near future. Our hearts also go out to both Knowles’s wife and child. Since Ms. Whitby was a student of Mr. Knowles at Penfield, and since both of them attended the same graduation party on Whitby Island last night, it’s likely that the two deaths are connected. However at this time we cannot be certain exactly what the connection is.”
“Got to give the old fart credit,” said McCabe. “He does this crap well.”
Shockley spent the next several minutes describing Aimée’s wounds in some detail, including the A carved into her chest. “At this point we have no idea what significance this letter might have, but we have to assume that the A stands for something.”
“I hope going public with that is the right thing to do,” said Maggie.
McCabe sighed. “Too late now. What’s done is done.”
“I will now take questions,” Shockley told the assembled reporters.
“Do you think Knowles killed the Whitby girl and then killed himself?” Eric Steinberg from the Bangor Daily News shouted out.
“That’s one of the possibilities we’re investigating, Eric,” said Shockley, “but it’s still too early to definitively declare this a murder/suicide scenario.”
“Chief Shockley, do we know if Knowles was having a sexual affair with Aimée Whitby?” The questioner was none other than Shockley’s girlfriend, Josie Tenant. He looked irritated at her question.
“I’m sorry, Josie, I can’t comment on that at this time.”
“Have there been any reports of his having had sexual relations with any other female students?”
“None that I know of.”
Reporters were shouting out a battery of questions, but Shockley had apparently decided not to answer any more.
“In conclusion,” he said, “I’d like to assure Aimée’s parents and friends and Byron Knowles’s family that this department will spare no effort or expense getting to the bottom of these tragic deaths. In the meantime, I urge anyone who has any information about this case to please step forward now and let us know. We’ve set up a special hotline at 1-800-555-1872. The identity of all those offering information will be kept absolutely confidential.”
“That ought to lure all the whackos out of the woodwork,” said Tom Tasco. “Hope we’ve got plenty of people working the phones.”
McCabe’s phone rang. Caller ID said US Coast Guard.
He muted the TV and flipped the phone to speaker so the others could listen. “This is McCabe.”
“Sergeant McCabe? This is Chief Petty Officer Karl Nelson, US Coast Guard Search and Rescue. We found your boat, sir.”
“You sure you’ve got the right one?”
“Yessir. A recently restored Midland 19. Originally built 1984. Registered to Byron Knowles of South Portland. Name’s the Patti Ann. She was spotted out of gas and drifting. About two kilometers south-southeast of Inner Green Island. No one aboard.”
“Okay. Good work. Where is the boat now?”
“She’s being towed into our South Portland station. Should be here in twenty minutes or so.”
“Do me a favor, Chief. If the boat gets there before my partner and I do, under no circumstances let anybody touch a thing inside. Not till our forensics people have had a chance to go over it.”
“Aye-aye, sir. Not a problem. I understand. I’ll alert our people at the gate that you’re on your way.”
Chapter 36
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, McCabe and Maggie stood at the end of the Coast Guard dock staring down into the interior of the Patti Ann. Nothing to see. Just an empty sport fishing boat. No weapons. No obvious bloodstains. Nothing but a little water sloshing around inside and pair of yellow waterproofs pushed in one corner near the bow.
“You know what I don’t get?” Maggie said. “If Knowles wasn’t the killer, why would a third man bring Aimée all the way back to Portland, then drag her up the Loring Trail and use a knife? Even if he wanted to rape her, there’s plenty of room and total privacy right down there in the back of the boat. When he was finished he could’ve dumped her overboard, like he supposedly did with Knowles. No leaving of DNA or anything else behind. Cleaner. Easier. Simpler.”
“I guess he wanted her body to be found.�
�
“Why?”
“Presumably to set up the murder/suicide scenario, which, if we buy it, puts an end to the investigation. Without a body, Aimée’s a missing person and we keep looking. And from what I’ve heard about Edward Whitby, so would he. Much safer for the bad guy to let us find her and blame Knowles.”
“Okay. But why not kill her on the island, carve the A and leave her there? If he wants to implicate Knowles, he leaves her cell phone there with all the texts and voice mails. Once he’s done with Aimée, he tosses Knowles in the boat, takes him out into the open ocean, sends the suicide note to Gina, and then dumps him overboard never to be found.”
McCabe raised both hands, palms out. “I don’t know. Maybe he just felt like doing it the way he did.”
Maggie shook her head in frustration. McCabe’s phone rang. Tom Tasco was on the other end.
“Yeah, Tom.”
“Whitby’s assistant, a woman named Martha Davis, just sent over the guest list for last night’s party. Two hundred and thirty-six attendees, including a lot of well-known names. Plus another fifty-two worker bees hired by the caterer. She included contact info for all of them. Phone and e-mail.”
“Efficient woman.”
“I agree, but we may need the National Guard if we’re gonna interview nearly three hundred people.”
“So call in some help. We need to find out if anybody saw anything in any way suspicious on the island last night. Also we need to identify anyone who might have had some motive for wanting to see Knowles and Aimée dead. Or maybe just Aimée. Knowles may have been collateral damage. You know the drill.”
“Okay. I’ll see if I can recruit some additional manpower from the Staties and start working the list.”
McCabe returned to Maggie, who seemed lost in thought.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“The letter A.”
