Fatal Tide

by Lis Wiehl

  “Can we hold off on that?” she said. Casey stared at her a moment before nodding and replacing the phone.

  “Okay.” The detective turned to Tommy. “Any idea how deep the water is where he is?”

  “Twelve feet, maybe,” Tommy said. “Wait here—I might have something we can use to fish him out.”

  While he was gone, Casey asked Dani if she’d finished her Christmas shopping.

  “Christmas shopping? I haven’t had a free moment to even think about it.”

  “You’re supposed to be recovering from PTSD,” Casey said. “Finding dead bodies in the backyard is an interesting definition of ‘lying low.’”

  Dani realized how fragile she must seem to the veteran detective, but before she could say anything else Tommy returned, holding a fifteen-foot boat hook.

  “Why do you have a boat hook?” Dani asked.

  “Because I have a boat,” Tommy said.

  “Where?”

  “In the barn.”

  “Why do you have a boat in the barn?”

  “They get damaged if you leave them in the ocean over the winter,” Tommy told her. “That’s why you see ’em shrink-wrapped and up on racks in marinas. I happened to have room in my barn.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “Fish,” he said. “In the ocean. I keep it in Bowden’s Harbor in Stamford.”

  “Whaddaya got?” Casey asked.

  “Boston Whaler,” he said. “A 370 Outrage with trip 300-horse Mercs.”

  “Those are nice boats,” Casey said. “My brother-in-law has an Egg Harbor out of Point Judith. We take it to B.I. every year for the Fourth of July.”

  “Sweet,” Tommy said. “That rip tide—”

  “Excuse me,” Dani said, interrupting, “but I’m really cold here—can we please get this guy out of the water to see what we’re looking at?”

  It took some doing because first Tommy had to break the ice to clear a channel between the body and the shore. The pole barely reached the man’s foot, but he managed to hook the body by the pant cuff and pull. It took ten minutes to drag it close enough for Tommy to grab the body by the ankle. Casey took the boat hook then and used it to grab the dead man’s other leg. The two of them then pulled the body up onto the shore.

  “Should we roll him over?” Dani asked.

  “Hang on a second,” Casey said, examining the body, which was nearly frozen stiff, the skin blue. He took out his cell phone and took three photographs of the body. Tommy did the same with his GPhone. “Okay. Let’s see who he is.”

  They rolled the body over. The man’s face was blue and distorted in death, but Dani nevertheless recognized him. She must’ve started, or made a noise, because Casey turned right around to look at her, a questioning expression on his face.

  “You know this guy?” the detective asked.

  “Yes. His name is John Adams Wharton,” she said. “He’s the headmaster as St. Adrian’s Academy.”

  “Betcha didn’t see that one coming,” Tommy said.

  19.

  December 22

  4:06 p.m. EST

  “You didn’t hear any shots?” Casey asked.

  “We didn’t,” Dani said. “Any idea how long he’s been in there?”

  “Nope,” Casey said. “He’s Popsicled pretty good, though.”

  He took a pen from his pocket and used it to move shreds of clothing on the body.

  “Three shots,” he said, lifting the body to see what was on the other side. “Three going in and three going out, I’m guessing. Looks like fairly close range. You said there’s a security camera?” The detective tapped the screen on his cell phone. “I’ll get some people here. If forensics tells us …”

  Dani stayed him again with a gentle touch on the arm. “We need to talk,” she said. “And then you can call whoever you need to call. It’s …”

  “Complicated?”

  “That would be one way to describe it.”

  “Let me find you that security footage,” Tommy said. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  “I suppose not,” Casey said, looking puzzled. “I certainly hope not, anyway.”

  In the house, while the detective and Dani made coffee with the Keurig, Tommy found his aunt in the laundry room and asked her where Reese was. Ruth said the boy was watching television in the media room and waiting for Tommy and Dani so he could enter the isolation tank.

  “Can you go tell him we’ll be awhile?” Tommy asked, keeping his voice low. “Something came up. Keep him down there for the time being.”

  He rejoined the others in the kitchen and, after grabbing some coffee himself, sat down at the computer to find the surveillance files for the previous night. When he’d located the file for the camera pointing in the direction of the pond, he clicked play. He watched a moment and then fast-forwarded at four times the normal speed, a digital clock in the corner of the screen counting forward rapidly. The woods were full of deep black shadows, but without more light he couldn’t tell if they were simply shadows or something more. Quinn had posited a theory about the Gevaudan beasts, that they were attracted to darkness the way moths were attracted to light. If they lived in darkness and felt safe in darkness, it made sense.

  There were no noteworthy events until ten minutes after three in the morning, when two figures entered the camera’s field of vision. The scene went by too quickly for Tommy to stop it in time, so he backed the play arrow up, moving it a quarter inch to the left on the transport bar. He hit play and ran the video at normal speed.

  “This have sound?” Casey asked.

  “Not outside. The interior cameras do,” Tommy said.

  “How much can you cover?”

  “Pretty much 360 degrees. House. Garage. Greenhouse. Barn. They’re activated by motion detectors.”

  “Why such an elaborate system?” Casey said. “If I can ask that.”

  “Came with the house,” Tommy said.

  “Here we go,” Casey said as the silhouettes of two men emerged from the darkness, moving from left to right. It was too dark to see clearly, but it appeared that the man on the left had his hand on the lower back of the man on the right. There was a dim aura of light cast on the yard and the pond by the floodlight pointing at Tommy’s house.

  As the man on the right gained separation from the man on the left, they saw that the man on the left held a gun.

  The man on the right turned his face toward Tommy’s house, and though it was dim, it was clear that it was Wharton. He held his hands up, pleading, his body language emphatic as he looked toward the house and appeared to be shouting. The man on the left fired three shots from about ten feet away. Wharton spun where he stood on the edge of the pond and fell into it, face forward.

  The killer approached the pond, looking down for a moment at the body, then tossed the gun into the pond and turned to leave. As he turned, there was light on his face.

  “Freeze that,” Casey said. “Back it up a little. Right there. Okay. Can you zoom in?”

  “I can’t change the lens, but I can enlarge the pixels,” Tommy said, clicking on the icon of a magnifying glass. “These cameras are only 720 DPI because they’d use up too much memory if they were higher res.”

  He enlarged the image a second time, and then a third. And then he stopped. Even at 720 DPI, it was clear who the killer was.

  “That’s a familiar face,” Casey said quietly.

  Tommy could only nod.

  The face was his own.

  20.

  December 22

  6:51 p.m. EST

  “Bartender,” Allison said. “My friend and I would like another drink. I would like mine with a wedge of salt. I mean lime. And salt.”

  “I’m fine,” Quinn told the bartender, holding his glass up to show he was drinking Diet Coke.

  “Are you sure?” the bartender asked Allison, eyeing her suspiciously.

  “Yes!” Allison said. “But this is my last one.”

  “You said that last
time, miss.”

  “It’s all right,” Quinn reassured the bartender. “I’m driving.”

  Allison laughed and leaned back until she nearly fell off the barstool.

  When Quinn invited her to dinner after work and asked her what her favorite food was, she’d said Mexican. The name of the restaurant was Holy Molé’s, and the drink she was drinking was a house special called a Tequila Mockingbird, which was a margarita with a shot of ouzo in it, a potent concoction. He hadn’t intended to ply her with liquor, but she was doing a pretty good job of it herself. She’d only had two, but she was surprisingly intoxicated, trying, he surmised, to calm her nerves.

  Quinn caught the bartender’s eye and held out his hand, pinching his finger and thumb together to tell the man to make Allison’s next drink as weak as possible. The bartender nodded.

  “I appreciate your joining me,” Quinn said. “You can get one impression of the place you work during work hours, but after hours you get the real story.”

  “To Linz Pharmahoosickle!” she slurred, raising her glass in a toast. “Clear genius! Total horse doo-doo, but clear genius.” They clinked glasses, and she sipped. “You know, I almost never drink like this. I’m a good girl! Except when I’m not. A person has a right to let her hair down every once in a while. Am I not right, or am I not right? Or not. Or am I not quite right in the head?”

  Quinn could tell she was nervous. She’d confided on the way to the restaurant that she hadn’t been on a date in four years.

  She laughed again, her eyes closed, swaying from side to side like a buoy. “You know what the problem is with people like you and me, Quincy old boy?”

  “Quinn,” he said. “Just Quinn.”

  “Right!” she said, then leaned toward him, close enough to kiss him. Quinn leaned back. “So, Quincy—you know what the deal is? What the problem is? With people like you’n me? Do you know?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “We have to work for people who are stupider than us,” she said, sitting back and taking one last bite of her enchilada, waving her fork at Quinn, a six-inch strand of melted cheese dangling from it. “Because we don’t have a choice. It’s just how the ol’ cookie crumbles. Sobeit! Sobeit. You know what makes chili peppers hot? Caspezium! Capsilicon. Casper-sasperilla.”

  The word she was looking for, Quinn knew, was capsicum, but she gave up trying to find it. When the bartender brought the drink she had ordered, he gave Quinn a surreptitious wink to indicate it had very little alcohol in it.

  “So what’s the deal with this Andrei Guryakin?” Quinn asked. “He’s an odd duck.”

  “Did you see how he got up in your grill?” Allison said. “That’s what the kids say. ‘Up in your grill.’ I heard that on MTV.”

  “I noticed,” Quinn said. “He goes out of the way to meet me and then he gets all …”

  “Up in your grill.”

  “Right,” Quinn said. “Up in my grill.”

  “That means teeth. With braces on them. Makes a person look like the front of a car. I had braces until I was twenty-two.”

  “Sounds like Andrei has some sort of problem with his father,” Quinn said. “As soon as I mentioned him, he got pretty defensive.”

  “I love my father,” Allison cooed. “He’s a great guy. I wish he was everybody’s father. Wait. That didn’t come out right.”

  “I know what you mean,” Quinn said.

  “You’re really nice,” Allison said, smiling at him. “I’m really glad we’re going to be working together.”

  “I am too,” Quinn said, aware that he was losing control of the conversation. “Are you going to tell me what Guryakin’s doing in Building C? Or am I going to have to guess?”

  She looked at him and put a finger to her lips. “Shh!” she said. “I’ll never tell. You have to guess.”

  “Allison—”

  “All right all right all right—you forced it out of me. It’s top secret, you know. Because it’s going to make the company a bazillion dollars. I’m not supposed to know, but I had a friend … She got fired. Yes she did. Are you trying to get me fired so you can take my job? Oh yeah. You’re my boss. Why would you want my job? I should be wanting your job.”

  She pushed her plate away from her. Quinn signaled to the bartender to bring two cups of coffee.

  “That was delicious!” She drained the last of her Tequila Mockingbird and slammed her glass down on the bar.

  “So what is it?” he asked again. “Why do they have a BioSafety Level 4 lab in the basement of Building C?”

  She crooked a finger, bidding him to come closer so that she could whisper in his ear. “It’s alive,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “Provivilan.”

  “The drug is alive?” He leaned in closer, to make sure he was hearing her correctly.

  She shook her head. “Not the drug. The virus. The virus makes the drug. They genetically engineered the virus to make the drug. But if the virus escapes …” She wove her fingers together, then exploded them. “Poof! It’s very dangerous.”

  “You’re talking about Provivilan,” he said, sitting up straight and jerking his head back, as if physical distance could lessen his surprise or his dismay.

  “Yep.”

  “I thought it took three months for the drug to build up before it becomes effective.”

  “That it does, yes sir,” Allison said. “But if the virus gets out, whoa Nellie. Hey—I do know how to say whoa. Whadaya know?”

  The bartender brought them their coffee.

  “If the virus gets out, it reproduces?” Quinn said.

  “You got it,” Allison said. “You know how?”

  “How?”

  “It’s in the water,” she said. “All those little teeny molecules that are already in the water. From all the selected sernatonin … the selective serotonin reuptake thingamajigs. It reassembles them. Do you know what happens then? Do you know?”

  “What happens then?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s not good because there’s no stopping it. It just keeps replicating until there isn’t any water left. I really don’t feel so well.”

  “Let me drive you home,” Quinn said, signaling for the check.

  “It’s Dr. Frankenstein’s fault, you know,” she said. “He got my friend fired. I don’t even know where she went. I tried to call her. I couldn’t find her anywhere.”

  Illena, Quinn thought. Allison was talking about Illena Nemkova. He had a sudden, sick feeling he knew exactly what had happened to her.

  “She was a really good person. Did you know her? No. You couldn’t have. She was gone before you started. You would have liked her.”

  “Yes. I’m sure I would have,” Quinn said. “Come on. Time to get you home.”

  He rose to help Allison with her coat. The first arm went through her coat sleeve without any trouble, but the second arm proved more difficult. Suddenly the room felt like it had tilted to the right, his vision swimming as his head suddenly pounded with pain. He closed his eyes and held his head down until the pain subsided.

  “Are you sure you can drive?” Allison said. “Do you want me to drive? Because I don’t think I can drive. I think we should call a cat. I mean a cab. Why would we call a cat? Here, kitty kitty kitty.”

  “I’m fine,” Quinn said, forcing a smile. “I haven’t been drinking. It’s just a low blood pressure thing, when I stand up too fast.”

  “Okay,” Allison said, zipping her parka.

  “Why was your friend fired?” Quinn asked.

  “She was fired for talking to a lady who was writing a book,” Allison said, hooking her arm in Quinn’s for support.

  “Do you know who was writing the book?”

  “I do, because I took a message one day when she called for my friend,” Allison said. “She said, ‘Please tell her to call Abbie Gardener.’ Did you know Abbie Gardener?”

  “By reputation,” Quinn said, opening the door for Allison and
then easing her gently into the car.

  “She was very, very old,” Allison said. “I hope to be very, very old someday.”

  Quinn held out the same hope for her, and for the rest of mankind, but if what she was saying about the virus was true, the odds in favor were pretty low.

  21.

  December 22

  7:20 p.m. EST

  “This is going to sound crazy,” Dani began. She was still struggling for the words she needed to make him believe her.

  “Uh-huh,” Casey said. “Go on.”

  “Are you a religious man?” she asked.

  “Am I religious?” Casey repeated. “If I can ask, what does that have to do with anything?”

  “It has everything to do with what’s been happening here,” Tommy said. “With what Amos Kasden did. And with the body in the pond. And with—”

  “You shooting him?”

  “That too. Though I didn’t shoot him.”

  “Really?” Casey looked dubious.

  Dani gave Tommy a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.

  “I’m listening. Call me crazy, but based on the video we just saw, I’m pretty sure you did. Unless you have an evil twin.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Tommy said.

  “Please, Detective,” Dani interrupted. “Just tell me. I’m not trying to pry, but are you religious?”

  Casey had accompanied them into the house reluctantly. He was a cop who did things by the book, and this wasn’t by the book.

  “My family is Irish Catholic,” he said. “But lately … I’ve been pulling away from the Church. I guess because of my job. Because of my nature too. To ask questions. But yeah … if you put a gun to my head, I’d say I was a man of faith.”

  “Good,” Dani said. “Then just listen, before you pass judgment. Because as I said, this is going to sound crazy at first. I hope by the time I’m done it’s going to start to make sense.”

  “I’ll try to keep an open mind,” Casey said. “Things are more likely to go in it that way.”

  She began with the murder of Julie Leonard, and how Abbie Gardener had paid Tommy a strange visit the night Julie was killed. Dani explained that she’d been having prophetic dreams that woke her every night at 2:13, and how, inexplicably, she and Tommy had had the exact same dream one night, an apocalyptic vision in which millions of people, all wearing white, were fleeing a large city as it was inundated by a flood while Dani raced upstream in a boat—though in Dani’s dream, she was in the boat, while in Tommy’s dream, he was high on a hill, watching her in the boat.