It terrified her.
“I don’t know what I feel like,” she said distinctly.
Archer watched Hannah for the space of a long breath, saw her fear of him, and accepted it. He didn’t blame her. She was no longer nineteen, with hope in her eyes and excitement in her smile. She had discovered that life was always unexpected and often cruel. She had learned to pull back, shut down.
To survive.
He wanted to argue that there was more to life than pain and death, that the Donovan family would take her in and accept her. Yet he didn’t say a word. He had no right to demand that she step out of her protective shell and share her life, her laughter, her love. He was the one who had left her to heal a man who couldn’t be healed.
But Len could hurt whoever tried to help him. And he had. The fear in her eyes was proof of it.
“Wouldn’t life be grand if kindness outlived cruelty?” Archer asked with a neutrality that didn’t quite hide the weariness in his soul. “But it doesn’t.”
He turned away, listing what had to be done in his mind. The sooner he found out what had happened to Len and Pearl Cove, the sooner he would be out of her life.
Broome was first on the list.
“So Mad Dog Len had a partner?” the cop asked, watching Archer skeptically. The big Yank with the sweaty dress shirt, faded jeans, and a worn rucksack slung over one shoulder looked hard and much too controlled for a constable’s peace of mind.
Archer nodded.
“That’s good news for his widow,” the cop said, dragging a match across the metal nameplate that said “Dave” and lighting a cigarette. “No one here will lend her a dollar to rebuild.”
“Why? Pearl Cove isn’t a license to print money, but it looks better than a lot of businesses around Broome.”
“Hey, Dave,” someone called from the back of the hot, humid, tin-roofed cave that passed for a police station. “Your wife is on the other line.”
“Tell her five,” the cop called back. Then his faded green eyes focused on Archer with a show-me-something-new weariness. “You want prosperous, mate? Try Cable Beach outside of town. That’s where the rich tourists go.”
“I’m not a tourist and you haven’t answered my question.”
“You’re not a native, either, or you’d know that people around here wouldn’t piss on Len McGarry if he was on fire.”
“No worries,” Archer said neutrally, using a favorite Aussie response. “He’s dead. An accident, I’m told.”
“Too right.” Dave blew out a stream of smoke that did nothing to improve the thick, close air of the station house. “McGarry drowned when a cyclone tore open a pearl-sorting shed and shucked him out of it like an oyster out of its shell.”
“Was there water in his lungs?”
“He was found floating facedown in six inches of ocean.”
“With a piece of oyster shell rammed between his ribs. Didn’t that strike you as odd?”
Dave looked bored. “You don’t have many cyclones in Seattle, do you? I’ve picked up blokes that had soda straws shoved through their groin or arteries cut by flying palm leaves. At two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, a lot of normal things turn lethal. Bloody hell, a piece of paper will slit your throat.”
“I know. The U.S. might be short on cyclones, but we’re long on hurricanes and tornadoes.”
The cop grunted. “A bit of oyster shell was the least of McGarry’s problems. He looked like he was run over by a road train. If it hadn’t been for his wasted legs, even his wife wouldn’t have recognized the bastard.”
Abruptly Archer was glad that Hannah hadn’t come to Broome with him. He had left her teaching English to eager children whose laughter and sparkling black eyes were like a tonic after all the grim memories of Len. Archer wished he could have stayed. He missed his niece’s innocence and uninhibited smile. But Summer was half a world away, and Len’s body was in the merciless here and now.
“If Len had been your brother, would you be investigating his death any differently?” Archer asked.
Thick, blunt fingers rubbed over the cop’s newly shaved face. He sucked on the cigarette and exhaled smoke. “I’d be crying.”
Archer almost smiled. “So it was just an accident, is that it?”
“Bloody right. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.” Dave’s hand came up suddenly, cutting off any reply. “Look, Yank. I’m not going to pretend that the world isn’t a better place without that sorry sod. But if I was inclined to make trouble about his death—and I’m not—I’d be talking to his widow. Is that what you want?”
For a moment Archer didn’t trust himself to speak. Jet lag was gnawing at him like a hangover, Hannah had been terrified beneath her brittle calm, and now this short-tempered Outback constable was threatening her.
“Harassing Mrs. McGarry would be stupid. You’re not a stupid man,” Archer said evenly. “May I see the body now?”
“You flew a long way to look at a dead man.”
“Yes.”
The cop waved his thick, sunburned hand, trailing a flag of smoke. “Go see him, mate. He won’t care. Nobody will.”
With wary cop’s eyes, Dave watched Archer walk away. He didn’t know what was on the Yank’s mind. He didn’t want to know. Working as a constable out beyond the Black Stump had taught him that there were two kinds of men: bad men, and bad men to cross. Bad men didn’t worry him.
Men like Archer did.
* * *
The place where Len’s body was being stored looked like what it was, a processing plant for the Kimberley shorthorn cattle that ran through Australia’s West like a hoofed red plague. But it wasn’t the right season for slaughter, so the meat locker was cold and empty except for three cyclone victims. Two were fishermen. One was Len. All three were covered with what looked like old sheets. The unexpectedly powerful storm had overloaded the tiny funeral home. Bodies destined for cremation had been shunted off to less plush surroundings.
“He’s the one over there,” the teenager said, his voice as rough as his red hair. He was too young not to be intimidated by death and too old to admit it.
“Thank you,” Archer said. “I’d like to be alone with him for a time.”
“No worries, mate,” the kid said, relieved. “Close the door hard when you leave.”
Archer waited for the door to close—hard—before he went to the table where Len lay. Even without the kid’s instructions, he would have known it was Len; below the torso, the sheet was nearly flat on the table. He flipped the covering down far enough to see the face and chest.
He grimaced, but not for himself. The thought of Hannah finding this mangled, battered flesh made him want to cry out in protest. She didn’t deserve to have that horrifying image sink into her mind, wellspring of future nightmares.
No one deserves all the good or the bad that comes their way. You take it the way it comes, one day at a time.
Hannah’s words echoed in the raging silence of Archer’s mind. They didn’t calm him, but they made it possible to let go of some of the anger and shove the rest of it down with all the other brutal images breeding nightmares in his own darkness.
Silently, fighting for the emotional distance that was necessary for what he must do, Archer studied what had once been his half brother and mentor in the bleak arts of survival. He remembered Len as a Viking—big, brawny, brawling, laughing like a madman one moment and stone silent the next. All of the silence and some of the brawn remained. Across the shoulders and in the arms, he was as powerful as Archer. The thick mane of blond hair had gone white in great, ragged streaks. Whatever marks rage or laughter might have left on Len’s face had been erased by the brutal hammering his body had taken before and after he died.
The piece of oyster shell lay beside Len, as though no one had been certain what to do with it. Four inches long, darkly iridescent on one side and sea-roughened cream on the other, broken at both ends, the shell was shaped like a clumsy, ruined knife. Even again
st its background of battered flesh, the death wound was obvious on Len’s ribs: it was a bloody, bruised mouth opened a finger’s width in shock. A knife would have left far less evidence.
Archer shrugged off the soft backpack he wore. The sweaty patch of shirt beneath turned cold the instant air touched it. He didn’t notice, any more than he had noticed the chill of the room after the first shock. He reached into his backpack, shoved aside the laptop computer, special cellular phone, and fresh underwear until he found the pencil-slim flashlight he was looking for.
Icy white light stabbed out, striking a gleaming darkness and rainbow colors from the oyster shell’s smooth inner surface. He picked it up and fitted it to the blunt, ragged, subtly curving wound between broken ribs. With only a slight pressure from his hand, he pushed the shell in; the previous wound was like a road hacked from a wilderness of intact flesh and bone.
When the shell would go no farther without being shoved, Archer bent and lined up the flashlight with the angle of the shell. It was dead on for the heart.
If Hannah was right that Len had been murdered, it hadn’t been an overhand shot, but one that had come up from under. Not the easiest way for a standing man to kill someone in a wheelchair. But if the target was lying on his back, it would be a simple enough maneuver, even for a diver with enlarged knuckles and a careful gait. For Flynn it would have been as easy as smiling.
Archer’s fingers closed around the shell fragment and rocked it with tiny motions, loosening it from the ribs. Then he examined the chance weapon beneath the unflinching white blade of his flashlight. The shell indeed could have killed Len, if it was long enough.
But it wasn’t. Barely an inch of the shell was bloodstained. That wasn’t long enough to reach the heart beyond the protective ribs.
After a final look, Archer put the shell back where he had found it, resting against a dead man’s hand. He rummaged in the backpack again. This time he drew out what looked like a pair of blunt-nosed pliers. Various tools—screwdrivers, a file, a punch, knives—were tucked into the hollow handles of the pliers like blades into a jackknife.
He tried one of the knife blades first. It went in between the ribs far enough to kill, and it went in without hesitation, without any force, following a path already made by a larger, broader knife.
Hannah was right. Len had been murdered.
Now that Archer had seen Pearl Cove’s isolation, he was betting that the murderer was known to Len, probably even worked on the pearl farm. Hannah certainly hadn’t mentioned any outsider staying through the cyclone. The murderer could still be there, secure in the general belief that Len’s death was accidental rather than deliberate.
Archer looked one last time at what had once been his brother. The big ring Len still wore gleamed coldly in the harsh light. Archer lifted the cold hand and looked more closely. Len hadn’t worn a ring at any time in Archer’s memory. This ugly rendition of a rough oyster shell wasn’t a wedding ring—neither Len nor Hannah wore one. Nor was it valuable. It had the feel of stainless steel rather than silver or gold or platinum. In a fight, the ring could have opened a man’s face to the bone.
He wondered if it was a present from Hannah, but rejected the possibility. There was no beauty in this ring, no grace, no value, nothing to recommend it to anyone but Len, who never looked at the world as other people did.
Archer slid the ugly, oversized ring off, and put it on the keyring in his pocket. It wasn’t much to remember a murdered brother by, but it was all he had.
He pulled the sheet over Len and left the building with long strides. The more he thought about Pearl Cove’s isolation, the less he liked Hannah being there alone. What was once her home had become enemy ground.
Six
Sitting in Hannah’s kitchen Archer looked at her computer and waved away a fly that circled lazily around his sweaty forehead. He doubted he would find anything useful on her machine, but she would think it odd if he didn’t even try. After all, Pearl Cove’s accounts were on the hard drive, and he was supposed to be an interested, if silent, partner in the enterprise. She had even told him her personal code before she gave in and went to bed.
On very quiet feet, he went to Hannah’s bedroom and looked in. She was lying on her stomach, one hand under her chin and the other buried under the pillow. Lemony light filled the room. So did heat. Neither one interfered with her deep sleep.
Archer went back to the kitchen, picked up his backpack, and reached for his cell phone. His brother answered on the first ring.
“Took you long enough,” Kyle said curtly.
“I had to go back to Broome.”
“Why?”
“Len’s body was there.” Archer stared through the screen and wished that the air whispering through the verandah could wash away the stink of the meat locker. But it couldn’t. Nothing could except time.
A lot of it.
The quality of Archer’s voice told Kyle that whatever his brother had found in Broome wasn’t pretty. “How bad?”
“Bad enough.” He closed his eyes, trying to banish the memory of Len laughing, of Len wounded, of Len raging against his useless legs, of Len lying mangled and murdered in a beef locker. He shifted his grip on the cellular that scrambled outgoing calls and decoded incoming ones from other Donovan phones. “What do you have for me?”
“Are you alone?” Kyle asked.
Archer thought of Hannah in the next room and of her deep, exhausted sleep despite the tropical brilliance of the afternoon. Yet even in the bottomless well of sleep, she twitched and moaned as though pursued.
He had told her about Len’s knife wound.
He hadn’t wanted to add to the horror of the nightmares that undoubtedly stalked her sleep, but he had done it just the same. She had flinched once. Just that. No more. A flickering of the eyelids, a sudden pallor around her lips, the clenching of narrow fingers into a fist. Then she had turned and walked into her bedroom. He had wanted to follow, to comfort her. He hadn’t. He didn’t trust himself to stop with a brotherly hug.
Nor was his own mind, his own sleep, free of nightmares. Some people weren’t affected by naked violence. Many simply got used to it after the first few times. For others, a lifetime wasn’t enough. Archer was one of them.
He hoped that Hannah wasn’t another.
“For now, it’s just me,” he said. “If I get elliptical, you’ll know what happened.”
“Damn, Archer, you sound whipped.”
“I am. Hannah is worse off. She’s been living on catnaps for five days.”
“Ouch. She must be hallucinating.”
“Edging right up to it.” He glanced toward the open bedroom door and spoke softly. “That’s one gutsy, tough lady. She didn’t let go until she knew someone was here to stand guard.”
“So who’s going to guard you while you sleep?”
“The Tooth Fairy.” Archer swallowed another yawn and reached for the lethal cup of coffee that was sitting on a small table next to the graceful, sensual sculpture. “Talk to me. What do you have on her?”
“I sent a lot of stuff to your coded e-mail, if you want more details. Otherwise, I’ll just hit the high points.”
Archer grunted and shifted in the rattan chair, making it creak. The verandah’s hammock chair tempted him, but he wasn’t certain it was up to his weight.
“Hannah McGarry didn’t exist in any files I could find from the time she was five until she married Len McGarry and applied for a passport,” Kyle said. “Her parents were U.S. citizens who lived overseas except for five years in Maine, presumably to give birth and get Hannah through the most dangerous years for a kid’s survival. Her mother is dead. Her father’s passport is still current, so I presume he’s alive.”
“They were missionaries who lived with the Yanomami in Brazil. Or did ten years ago. He probably still does. It was what he loved more than he loved his daughter. They disowned her when she ran off with Len.” Archer swallowed some more bitter coffee. “Before that, Ha
nnah was raised in the Brazilian rain forest in a Yanomami hunting camp.”
“That would explain the lack of documentation. Her marriage was recorded in Macao. Civil ceremony. You were the only witness.”
No news there for Archer. The memory of that day wasn’t one of his favorites. Savage heat, acrid smoke from street vendors’ grills hazing the air, the hurry and stink of poverty chasing wealth, the dreams in Hannah’s eyes and the emptiness in Len’s.
“Archer? You awake?”
“Keep talking,” he said, because it was better than saying what he was thinking: he had been a fool for ever thinking that Hannah’s sweet innocence could neutralize, much less heal, Len’s bitter experience. “I’m here.”
“Her passport shows a lot of action in the next three years. All over Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Philippines, every port I’d ever heard of and some I hadn’t. No credit record, though. They must have paid cash for everything, including the ten days she spent in a hospital in Kuching.”
“Hospital? When? Why?”
“About four months after she was married, she got real sick. The records just said something about a fever of unknown origin. They came within an ace of losing her, first to fever and then to bleeding. She’s A positive, by the way.”
“Did she have one of those hemorrhagic fevers?”
“No. She miscarried a seven-month fetus. Stillbirth. A boy. Hard to believe we had a little nephew and never knew it.”
Archer didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He could barely breathe around the vise gripping his gut. Len had never mentioned Hannah’s near-fatal illness or the loss of their child.
“Did you know about that?” Kyle asked after a minute.
“No.”
Though Archer said nothing more, Kyle knew his brother too well to be fooled by silence.
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