My stomach growled. Other than a couple of Little Debbie snack cakes I had helped myself to from a box I found on the galley table, I hadn’t eaten today. I couldn’t in good conscience leave Parker Alley here while I looked for food. There must be a mess hall or commissary on the premises. I looked around at the buildings. Maybe some of the onlookers would find the courage to come close enough to say hello and ask if they could do anything for me. Maybe not, I thought, as the closest group of three turned away when I looked in their direction. I would just have to wait. I began walking up and down the pier, never more than fifty feet in either direction from Parker Alley. It wasn’t a nervous back-and-forth pacing as much as it was a time-passing activity. I find that thoughts come easier to me while I’m doing something mindless, like walking or driving. And I had a lot of thinking to do.
I soon grew tired of pacing and thinking. I had basically run through every possible scenario that might explain what had transpired over the past two days, rehashed all forty-one years of my life, and come up with an entire self-improvement strategy by the time I decided to sit and rest on a short piling beside the corpse. My knee-high rubber boots were sock eaters, having chewed the white cotton that had hugged my calves and spit it out into the toes, where it cramped all five digits of each foot. Kicking off the boots, I retrieved and replaced my socks, then pulled the boots back on and began humming an Otis Redding tune. I was glad I didn’t own a wristwatch. Even the Coast Guard had grown bored with the not-unfolding scene and everyone had resumed their various maintenance activities. By the time I had chirped through the whistling part of the song for about the fifteenth round, a black hearselike vehicle pulled slowly through the gate, followed by a large silver pickup truck. They had a leg up on Green Haven, I thought. At least they had a hearse instead of a converted bakery truck.
I stood and waited by the body while the hearse backed toward the end of the pier. When it was as close as it could get to where I stood, two men emerged, one from each side of the front seat. They nodded in my direction, and then waited for someone to climb out of the truck that had parked just ahead of them. The truck was a crew cab. The inside of the large cab appeared to be full of people whom I assumed were Alleys, since I recognized the man who was now shaking hands with the coroner as the brother of the deceased, the fellow I had originally met offshore with Cal, and the same person I had seen yesterday in Cobble Harbor dressed for the funeral. One of the men opened the back of the hearse and pulled a backboard type of stretcher from inside and carried it down the pier toward me. The other two men followed close behind.
Quick introductions confirmed the driver of the hearse was indeed the county coroner, whose job was to pronounce Parker Alley dead. The man with him was the Alleys’ family doctor, who had agreed to issue a medical certificate of death by drowning to eliminate the postmortem examination and allow the family to get on with the closing of this horrid chapter. Obviously, they knew nothing of the spike. Maybe, though, they could still get away with saying death by drowning and not by suicide. Who knew what you could do in these small towns?
I learned that Parker’s brother was named Evan Alley, as all three men introduced themselves to Knox County Deputy Sheriff Jane Bunker—that is, me. I warned Evan to prepare himself before the bag was opened. He said that he appreciated my concern, but he didn’t believe anything could faze him at this point. He said that he was just a walking zombie and wanted to put this in the past for his entire family.
“Let’s get to it,” said the coroner as he knelt down beside the sleeping bag and began to work the zipper. He unzipped nearly the full length of the bag before finally unveiling the corpse with a quick peel of the sides of the bag.
Evan Alley’s reaction was as I expected it might be, in spite of his initial calm and assurance that he was ready for anything. He gasped and the color drained from his face. He grabbed the front of his own shirt and beat it in and out as if trying to get air. He turned and began walking toward the truck. It must have been awful for him to see his brother’s body, especially with a bait iron through it. But I was the one who was surprised when I heard what he was wailing. “It ain’t him,” he cried. “That body ain’t him.”
9
I DON’T STUN EASILY, but I felt as though someone had pulled a chair out from under me. If this was not Parker Alley, who was it? And where was Parker Alley? The coroner, doctor, and I stood speechlessly and watched the scene unfolding by the side of the pickup truck, from which the family had emerged. There were tears of what I imagined were extreme frustration and disbelief, and hugs of support. I wanted to introduce myself to the Alleys and set up a time to talk with Lillian, whom I assumed was the woman in the center of the group, the one who was now dabbing the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. But I knew I should wait for at least a few minutes to allow them a bit of privacy as they absorbed this mixed news. How would it feel, I wondered, for a wife to be on the receiving end of a negative ID? Would there now exist a glimmer of hope that your husband was still alive? Or are your hopes of closure dashed in bitter disappointment?
I shifted my focus to the corpse. Funny, I hadn’t thought to look at the man’s face until now. In the brief time on the Quest’s deck before he was covered, I had concentrated on the means of death rather than the dead. Jet-black hair, a small mustache, and a slight slant in the shape of his eyes; he certainly didn’t look like someone central casting would have sent over to play the part of a member of the Alley clan and resident of Cobble Harbor, Maine. I pried an eye open. It was as black as I had ever seen in someone living or dead. I checked the pockets of his jeans and denim shirt, hoping for some clue to his identity, but came up empty. Unzipping the foot end of the sleeping bag, I exposed black socks and black Nike sneakers. I patted down the corpse’s legs—nothing. In my experience, anytime an adult male is found with absolutely nothing in his possession—no wallet, no cigarettes, and no loose change—it is because someone has handled the corpse before the cops. “Do you know who this is?” I asked the men.
Neither man had any idea of the identity of the corpse. “So much for the quick ID, death certificate, and ride to the funeral parlor,” said the coroner. “Give me a hand loading him up, would you please? I’ll drop the doc back at his office and head to the morgue in Augusta.”
“Will there be an autopsy report available for me to see?” I asked.
“There will certainly be an inquest. We’ll need statements from you and the captain of the vessel that recovered the body. Our budget doesn’t allow for many full autopsies, but we’ll do a clinical inspection with toxicology.” He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and handed me a business card. “You can call my office in forty-eight hours to have a copy faxed to the Sheriff’s Department. In the meantime, it looks as though you’ll be busy finding a missing person and a murderer.”
Murder, although it was quite obvious, was something that until now I had been hoping could be explained away. Now that the coroner had said the word, there was no denying that this probably could not have been a suicide. A murder investigation would certainly distract me from my goal of damming the flow of illegal drugs into my territory. Of course, this apparent murder could be related to drugs, I realized. But right now, until I had some very basic facts, I knew I shouldn’t even be trying to make a connection. I had to think for a second about why I was so much more interested in solving the drug case than in finding a murderer. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get excited about helping to convict a killer—of course I could. But that would simply mean getting justice for someone who was, well, let’s face it, already dead. If I was able to stop the heroin from coming in, I would be helping prevent future deaths.
“Before we zip him back up, I’d like to see if anyone can ID him,” I said as I took a step toward the truck. When I got no objection, I turned away from the coroner to see the Alley family coming down the pier single file, with Evan in the lead. The coroner, doctor, and I fell into place quite naturally to shield the
fully exposed corpse from view.
“Miss Bunker, this is some of the rest of my family. I thought you’d need to talk with them, and they all want to have a look at the body,” Evan said, and then introduced the three other people to the coroner and me. They already seemed familiar with the doctor. The young man was Evan’s son, as I had assumed upon seeing them together aboard Ardency at the scene of the circling boat two days before. The middle-aged man was another brother, Jack, the youngest of three Alley boys. Lillian was a striking woman with classic facial features—high cheekbones and skin that appeared to dislike the sun. Her green eyes were rimmed red; she looked like she had been crying straight through from when her son had died until now, and she held herself in a way that suggested she wasn’t sure if her crying would ever end. When I extended my right hand to her for a shake, she grasped the outside of it with her left and gave it a tight squeeze, as her right hand was now holding her nephew’s arm for support. “I warned her about the body,” Evan said of Lillian. “But she wants to help if she can.”
“I’m a big girl,” Lillian said. “What can be worse than seeing your son in a casket? Besides, Parker and I have been married since we were kids. I know better than anyone who his friends and enemies are. If it’s someone who knew Parker, I’ll know who it is.” The coroner and I separated, leaving a wide gap between us through which Lillian passed with her nephew. She released her grip on the young man’s arm when they were next to the body and then she circled slowly, looking at him from every angle. After a few minutes, she carefully pulled the sleeping bag back over the top of the body. “I’ve never seen him, but that could be my husband’s bait iron in his chest.”
“Lillian, you don’t know that,” Evan said, sounding as if he were pleading with her not to say anything more. “That’s ridiculous. Every lobster boat on the coast of Maine has a tool just like that aboard. It could be mine.”
“Look, Evan: Parker is missing; they searched for him and found this guy instead. This isn’t New York Harbor, and these people aren’t stupid.” I refrained from thanking her for the compliment. “Parker is not a violent man, but he would defend himself.” She was now addressing me specifically. “If he killed this guy, it was self-defense and he is still alive, right?” My opinion was that Lillian was grasping at any hope, but she could be delusional and actually believe that her husband would be home for dinner tonight. I knew from past experience that people clinging to hope, even to the remotest possibility, are always far more likely to talk than people who have come to terms with a loss. I needed to have some time with her before the last glimmer of optimism faded away. “Do you plan to continue looking for my husband, Ms. Bunker?”
“Indeed I do,” I answered. “If your husband is alive, we need to move quickly. Missing persons who aren’t located within the first seventy-two hours of their disappearance have a tendency to remain missing. I could get search warrants for your house and the boat, and can requisition your records, but that would waste precious time.”
“How can we help?” Lillian was now enlisting her family members, who did not resist.
“I’ll need access to everything—phone records, bank statements, financial portfolios, tax returns, receipts, personal computer, personal correspondence in any form—everything. I’ll need a list and contact information of friends and enemies.” So far all of this was met with eye contact and a nod to each item I mentioned. “I’ll need to talk with anyone who may have seen Parker the day he disappeared.” Lillian seemed genuinely interested in not only cooperating but participating in the investigation, as she pointed at Evan and let him know, in a loud whisper, that she expected him to be able to supply those names. Now, I thought, was the proper time to push my luck with Lillian. “And as painful as it might be for you, I will have to ask questions about your son.” I genuinely felt bad about asking and opening up such a fresh wound, but my investigation into the drug problem also needed to move swiftly or any leads would probably evaporate.
Lillian grew about two inches in height due to the sudden tensing of every muscle in her body. I knew I had pushed too hard too soon. Sadness in her green eyes was replaced with anger as she said, “You’ll leave Jason out of this, or you’ll get no help from me.” Like any mother, Lillian was naturally willing to throw anyone or anything under the bus to protect the memory of her child. I apologized and agreed to concentrate only on finding Parker—for now.
The men seemed uncomfortable, having just been faced with a situation that could have escalated to something very ugly, very quickly; they got busy putting the corpse into a real body bag and then placing the whole kit and kaboodle onto a litter and into the back of the hearse. While they did, I tried to distract Lillian and get her to forget her near rage with lists of things for her to do and information to gather. As long as we stayed on the subject of how to expedite my investigation into the whereabouts of Parker Alley, well, then we were fine. With what I knew so far—the circling boat, the absence of its captain, and the corpse with a bait iron through its chest, found just where a body would be if it fell off Parker’s vessel—I had a hard time pretending that I might be looking for a missing person and not a murderer and/or another corpse. I recalled the message left by Mr. Dubois about changes to Parker Alley’s life insurance policy and understood that such adjustments could indicate many things. But my search for the alive-and-well Parker Alley would give me cover as I charged into the innards of Cobble Harbor; I hoped the show would be worth the price of admission. And, although searching for missing persons is really more about paperwork than real investigating (now, busting drug rings—that’s genuine detective work!), Parker Alley was my responsibility, alive or dead. I was, after all, deputy sheriff and insurance consultant.
By the time the door of the hearse was slammed shut, Lillian and I were speaking civilly and had agreed that she would get to work on her end as soon as she got home that afternoon. I was to meet her the following day at ten A.M., at her house, to which she gave me simple directions from the town dock. She climbed into the front passenger side of the truck as Jack took the driver’s side and the nephew hopped into the backseat. My silent wondering as to where Evan would sit was answered after the truck left him behind in the parking area. “The Coast Guard has released Parker’s boat, so I’ll steam her home to Cobble Harbor,” he explained.
“Can I catch a ride with you?” I asked, remembering that I needed to get to Cobble Harbor to pick up my car.
“My wife would not appreciate that. Sorry.” He looked genuinely embarrassed to deny me the lift.
“Oh” was about all I could say to that. “Well, I will need to get aboard the Eva B. to take a look around for the insurance company,” I added truthfully.
“Maybe you should catch a ride with the coroner. He has to go right by your car to take the doc back to work,” Evan suggested. “I’ll have the boat back home before you get there and will leave her tied at the town dock. You can go aboard and do whatever you need to do.”
I had a suspicion that Evan didn’t want me aboard his brother’s boat for some reason other than a jealous wife, but the coroner and doctor were getting into the hearse, and I really needed a ride. I didn’t imagine Southwest Harbor had taxi service. I had already been aboard the Eva B., and she’d been at the Coast Guard station for nearly two days. So what would the harm be in waiting a couple more hours to do a thorough inspection? I chased the hearse as it slowly pulled away, catching it before the gate, and giving the Coast Guardsmen another scene to ponder.
The coroner and doctor talked freely in my presence, or I should say they talked across me as I sat between them on the bench-style front seat of the hearse. Although I had been willing to ride in back with the corpse, I was pleased when the doctor opened his door and offered me a place up front with the living. The coroner had begun the inquest and I was glad to hear what the Alleys’ family doctor had to say about the clan; most of the Alleys were his patients. They were good people, in his opinion. Everyone was sho
cked by the death of Jason. In fact, his had been the first and only overdose from heroin or any other illegal substance in the area that the doctor knew of. Drugs had always been a factor in Bangor, which was far more metropolitan than the remote towns situated on the ends of these long, twisting peninsulas like the one we were now traveling, the doctor said. He knew of a few methadone clinics in Maine—in Bangor, South Portland, Waterville, and Westbrook—but everyone always said that no such clinic was needed in this vicinity. And until just recently, the doctor had believed that to be so: “The traditional belief was always that the drugs just never made it down here from Bangor. But with the traffic this area sees in the summer from every major city in the country, I guess it was only a matter of time.” Interesting, I thought, that the summer community bore responsibility for the local drug trade in the doctor’s eyes. “And now we’ve got a murderer on the loose. What next?”
The coroner asked more questions about the Alley family, but the doctor didn’t seem to have much more to add. All he could say was that they seemed to be quite a healthy group, as they appeared only for scheduled yearly physicals. They didn’t even smoke or drink, the doctor confided, and this was most unusual among the year-rounders who relied solely on lobster fishing for their livelihood. “Slow fishing drives most of them to drink, which they can’t afford for all of the reasons we’re aware of. The Alleys are good fishermen, and Parker is known all over town as top dog. I wouldn’t say he’s well liked, but that’s common. You know, a jealousy thing.” A little soft prodding by the coroner on the subject of enemies had the doctor admitting that, while he wasn’t in the know enough to provide names other than “Beals,” which echoed Quasar’s opinion of a long-running family feud, he did understand that lobster fishing was a cutthroat business in which only those willing to cut throats survived. What he didn’t say, but he clearly implied, was that Parker must have been plenty willing to cut throats to be known as the best.
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