Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

“We aren’t doing very well, are we, Hannah? Our projects seem to have failed miserably.”

  “Our projects didn’t take a hurricane into account.”

  “No. But that doesn’t explain the state of our marriage. Now does it?”

  Her tongue clicked with irritation, her eyes rolled. “I really don’t have time for this, Charles. I’m trying to finish a grant application. I’m low on funds, as you very well know.”

  “That’s no fault of mine,” he said gently. “I’ve beggared myself for you, Hannah. And to little purpose. Is that why you ‘re going to this party tonight? To meet fund-raisers?”

  “The da Silvas are friends. Their son Will practically lives here.”

  “You have no friends, Hannah. Only prospective backers.” Charles reached over and released the pencils from her hair. It cascaded darkly about her shoulders, and he sighed. “Such a beautiful face. And yet there’s no heart behind it. How did Jay die, Hannah?”

  She did not answer immediately, but he was prepared to wait. Charles was very good at waiting. He had outlasted every rival for Hannah’s attention, and he sometimes thought she had simply rewarded him for endurance, as though it were a prize genetic trait she might replicate under controlled conditions.

  “He drowned.”

  “Really. How unfortunate.”

  “For Jay, perhaps.”

  “You’re singularly unmoved.”

  Something flickered in her face—a trick of the light, or a current in the air between them. It could never have been emotion.

  “But you know,” he said conversationally, “I learned that much from the talk in town. That Jay drowned. What I wanted to know, Hannah, was how he died. I don’t have to ask you why.”

  The sound of tires crunching over gravel drifted through the Quonset hut’s thin walls. Hannah peered beyond him, as though he were invisible, and said, “It’s Paul.”

  “Paul?”

  “Winslow,” she said patiently. “The scalloper.”

  “You mean the addict, don’t you? I suppose I’d better see him.”

  “There’s no need to do me any favors, Charles.” Hannah closed her notebook, supremely indifferent to his gaze. He realized that she would leave, that easily, without admitting she had ignored his questions. He crossed to her swiftly and seized her wrist. It twisted painfully in his grasp.

  “Know this, Hannah,” he told her softly. “I won’t be around much longer. Until spring, perhaps, or at the outside, summer. Then you’ll have to find someone else to buy into your dreams.”

  “You sicken me, Charles.” Her wrist slid away from his fingers.

  “Why? Because I no longer believe your lies? Or because I haven’t the stomach for death?”

  These questions, like the others, she didn’t bother to answer.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Merry drove aimlessly for a while after she left Tim Potts, following Liberty Street out of town and then heading toward the South Shore, where empty miles of native heath undulated beyond her windshield. She found herself finally at Cisco Beach, an empty expanse of graying sand with nothing but surf on the horizon. Rank upon rank of curling waves were hurrying toward the beach, punctuated by a solitary figure—man or woman, Merry couldn’t tell—trudging along the waterline in a red parka. A retriever dashed forward and back, turned tail and leaped high, its tongue lolling crazily. As Merry watched, a stick hurtled through the air, and the dog dove after it into the churning sea. Merry shivered involuntarily. The water must be deathly cold.

  How, exactly, did it kill you? Like a gentle form of sleep, numbing the senses completely until consciousness and life slipped away together? Or did the mind resist, denying the inevitable with increasing horror? How long would it have taken young, athletic Jay to lose the battle with the boat basin?

  He was a good swimmer. He was familiar with Old North Wharf. He wouldn’t have simply fallen in and drowned, unless his body was completely beyond his command.

  Which left two possibilities.

  Jay Santorski had so much heroin in his system when his bicycle went into the water, he never even thought to swim back to the wharf.

  Or Jay Santorski was carried by boat—the boat that Howie’s Irene had heard at three A.M.—to the end of the jettied channel, and left in the frigid water to die. A half mile at least from Old North Wharf, too far to swim back in his heavy clothes and shoes. Even without heroin in his bloodstream, his chances would have been slim.

  But if a boat had carried the scalloper to his death, why hadn’t it carried him just a little farther—beyond the harbor and out into the Sound, where the approaching nor’easter might have sent his body miles away from the scene of his murder? Why leave him to be discovered a few hours later, in the very path of the approaching ferry?

  As a warning, perhaps. A cautionary example. Which brought Merry to Mystery Number Two.

  Had Jay Santorski died because of Matt Bailey?

  She pulled her hands out of her pockets and worked her way down the dunes to the beach. Began to trudge, like the figure in red, with her head down and her eyes on her shoes. She wished, suddenly, for a dog—Peter’s dog, Ney, who was almost her own—and a stick to charm him with.

  Whenever Merry tried to cut a new path through the maze of what she knew and feared about this investigation, she inevitably ran smack into the wall that was her father. John Folger was deliberately concealing the truth about Bailey and the scalloper. The simplest explanation was that a drug sting had blown up in Bailey’s face; Jay, his agent, had been killed; Bailey had run; and John Folger intended to keep the whole thing secret from both the DA in Barnstable and the interfering press. He had destroyed Bailey’s files and denied that any undercover operation had ever taken place.

  Why hadn’t he just declared the kid’s death an accident, and left Merry in Greenwich?—Because he knew a coroner would find the needle marks on Santorski’s arm, and decayed heroin in his bloodstream. Or because Bailey might turn up and blow the careful fabric of lies.

  Or because the Chief had too much integrity to follow through on a cover-up, regardless of the consequences. But if that were the case, he should have told Merry the truth.

  Which might mean that the truth was even worse than she had imagined.

  Are you suggesting Matt killed him? Tim Potts had asked, accusingly. Was it even possible?

  If Bailey feared for his own life, perhaps. Or if Jay had posed a threat to Bailey’s security.

  What if Bailey had been dealing drugs, instead of running a sting—using his police powers to dispose of confiscated cocaine and heroin taken in raids? Maybe he was Margot St. John’s dealer, and Jay, infatuated with Margot, decided to turn Bailey in. Bailey realized his danger Thursday night, called Hannah Moore to tell her he was leaving the island, and met Jay one last time at Old North Wharf.

  Merry shook her head in frustration. The theory didn’t fit. It was Jay who had needle marks in his arm, after all; and when Bailey called Hannah Moore, he talked more about coming back early than getting out of town. He’d talked, in fact, about her husband. And something he’d found in Cambridge.

  She came to a stop on the sand, her eyes fixed on the churning waves. The nor’easter had thrown a considerable amount of seaweed back up on shore; a few dead fish were trapped in the wrack, smelling pungent in the chill air. Merry recorded the odors and sounds with one half of her mind; the other followed Matt Bailey through his purposeful, obscure convolutions. He had been investigating Hannah Moore’s husband during his time in Cambridge. He had learned something damaging. That much was certain from the tape. Jay Santorski knew Hannah Moore. And Jay Santorski had left a brilliant career at Harvard—which, the last time Merry checked, was still in Cambridge—to work on the island where Hannah Moore lived.

  If her theory was correct, and Bailey was linked to Jay by the common thread of a heroin sting, then perhaps Charles Moore was the target. And if he had overheard Bailey’s phone conversation with his wife, Hannah, he knew all about
the sting.

  Why kill Jay, then, and not Bailey? Why sink the tape and the hypodermic on the harbor bottom?

  She was trapped in a pocket of the maze. But something—apprehension, instinctive knowledge—told Merry that her father was sitting at its center.

  The red-jacketed figure darted back down the beach, the dog barking at its heels. A hood was flung back, and hair streamed out in the wind—dark brown hair with red lights, like Peter’s.

  Merry no longer asked herself why she had left Peter so precipitately Friday morning. She knew now that she had had no choice. Her role in the drama was preordained, and central to its resolution. She sensed dimly that a kind of freedom might lie beyond it. She would never again regard her father’s opinion as of paramount importance, or look for self-worth in his grudging words of praise. She had touched his feet of clay. If even John Folger was fallible, then his daughter could err in peace. And find courage to goon.

  She shoved a hand in her pocket and fingered Matt Bailey’s spare set of keys. She had won them, after lengthy debate, from Tim Potts. Bailey’s apartment would probably look as pristine as his office; but Merry had to search it anyway. Regardless of the evils it might reveal.

  Feeling unutterably lonely, she took a last look at the sea, and turned back to her car perched high on the bluff.

  Matt Bailey lived in a two-bedroom condo on Sparks Avenue, not far from the fire station, the supermarket, and his son Ryan’s school. Merry hesitated before the dark red front door, eyeing its brass dolphin knocker—a remnant of Jennifer’s good taste, probably—and listened. Only the heavy silence of inoccupancy. She unlocked the door and slid inside.

  She had expected Baileys house to feel dusky, like the dim cave of a hibernatory animal—the atmospheric extrapolation, perhaps, of his office at the station. Instead, it resembled nothing so much as a Pottery Barn catalogue. Jute rugs were scattered across bare hardwood floors; the windows were dressed in beige roman shades, tightly furled to admit the gray light; an overstuffed couch covered in blue denim dominated the middle of the room. There was a cart for the TV and VCR, and a tidy pile of newspapers stacked near the door for recycling.

  Merry crossed to these, and flipped through them briefly; the Sunday Boston Globe, back issues of the Inky. All had been read, refolded, and arranged by date.

  It was unfortunate, Merry thought, that she had never bothered to visit Bailey before. She might have known, then, whether the almost obsessive tidiness everywhere in view was as much at variance with Bailey’s habits as the present order of his office. But she knew very little, in fact, about Matt Bailey, and she had never wasted much time in the study of his character. He was uninspired by work, insecure about his standing within the force, and prone to bragging about his exploits. Since his wife’s fulminating departure for the mainland three years ago, he had seemed incapable of sustaining a relationship. He specialized in women twenty years his junior, who were wowed by the fact that he carried a gun. Bailey was the sort of person, in short, whom Merry detested automatically, without having the slightest inclination to prove herself wrong.

  They had got off on a poor footing—Bailey resenting what he considered favoritism in the Chief’s awarding of cases, and letting it be known that Merry was nothing but a quota filler in the force’s Affirmative Action program. She, for her part, had never made any attempt to disguise her contempt. She had made it a cause célèbre, as though ridiculing Bailey were a prize skill, a game in which she was particularly adept. She’d prided herself on despising the man, because she needed to place a gulf between them. Her sense of self-worth depended on it.

  He was incompetent; she was not. He was lazy; she was driven. He was a putz who couldn’t think his way out of his own clothes at night; she had solved every crime her father had handed to her.

  Only she hadn’t, had she?

  The Osborne case had completely defeated her. And too many people had died because of it. Merry had very nearly been killed herself—and on occasion, when her thoughts were particularly black, she believed this a miscarriage of justice. Having failed to save the others, she should probably have died with them. A certain tragic balance would then have been struck.

  Better yet, she should simply have let Matt Bailey handle the serial killer case. Then she might have triumphed over him at a distance and been satisfied.

  She glanced around the room, saw what might be a coat closet door set into the space below a flight of stairs, and beyond it the kitchen. She should check any closets first; he might keep a shoe box filled with tax returns. Or his personal diary, in which every fact about Hannah Moore’s life or Jay Santorski’s death might be recorded. Who knew? Stranger things had happened.

  The bedroom closet held only a quantity of clothes, some luggage, a dusty set of golf clubs, and a year’s worth of Playboy. The dresser drawers were filled with underwear, socks, polo shirts in need of washing, and four pullover sweaters. Wherever Bailey had gone last Thursday, he hadn’t taken much with him.

  The door under the stairs did, in fact, lead to a closet. Merry peered under the hems of parkas and overcoats, and found to her delight that Bailey apparently had no affection for shoe boxes. He had, however, invested in a black metal filing cabinet—sturdy, two-drawered, and refreshingly official. She sat cross-legged on the floor, heedless of dust, and pulled on the handle.

  Locked.

  She pushed herself to her feet, and made for the kitchen junk drawer. Anything—a metal nail file or a paper clip-might work. But the Bailey junk drawer seemed to hold only a corkscrew, a set of measuring spoons still powdered with aged cinnamon, a roll of tape, a Phillips screwdriver, and a quantity of grocery store coupons long out-of-date. Merry eyed the screwdriver, and abandoned it as unlikely.

  Next, she tried the bathroom medicine cabinet. Nothing but laxatives, Band-Aids, and ibuprofen.

  In the bottom drawer of the sink cabinet, however, she hit pay dirt. Two bent bobby pins—probably discarded and forgotten by Bailey’s ex-wife, whom Merry remembered vaguely as having long brown hair—were wedged at the very back, between a rolled-up heating pad and a box of condoms. Merry seized them without a pang of guilt for having rifled Bailey’s bathroom domain, and ran back to the recalcitrant filing cabinet.

  Only then did she see the keys to the file drawer, perched innocently above her head on the closet shelf. Stifling a curse, she grabbed them and opened the first drawer.

  A short inspection revealed this to contain mostly documents pertaining to Bailey’s private life. He was surprisingly methodical, with files for Ryan’s medical visits, his artwork, his report cards by year; files for taxes, and charitable deductions, credit card statements and bank accounts. One file held a yellowed marriage certificate, a decree of divorce, and Bailey’s passport—or what remained of it: an envelope marked with the Department of State’s return address.

  Merry looked at this thoughtfully, and set it aside.

  Then she picked up the bank accounts.

  A swift survey of Bailey’s checking deposits and withdrawals showed a depressing pattern. He regularly lived beyond his means, and spent the last week of the month completely in the red. The Pacific National Bank had something they liked to call overdraft protection—essentially a line of credit that kicked in when the account holder was overdrawn—and Bailey regularly resorted to it. From what Merry could see, he rarely paid it back. He was in considerable debt to his friends at Pacific National.

  She pulled a copy of Jay Santorski’s bank statement from her purse and tried, as best she could, to coordinate his bimonthly cash deposits with Bailey’s withdrawals.

  There was no correlation whatsoever.

  Merry sat back on her heels, deflated. Either Bailey had never used Jay as an agent, or he’d taken the money from a different account—the police discretionary funds, which only the Chief could authorize. If that was the case, Merry’s father was involved in this mess up to his eyeballs. And he’d ordered the paper trail destroyed.

  A
lternatively, a small voice inside her argued, Bailey and Jay had nothing to do with one another. Jay’s extra two hundred dollars came from somewhere else—his mother, perhaps—twice a month like clockwork. Or maybe he had got it from stealing tips.

  Merry laughed that idea out of town. She was placing her bets on Laurie Hopfnagel for responsibility in that case.

  She returned the bank statements to their file and closed the first drawer.

  The second one contained only one manila folder—but it was remarkably thick. Inside was almost a ream of typewritten paper.

  Merry glanced at the first of the double-spaced pages, and knew suddenly why Bailey had spent so much time at his office computer, despite his light workload. His body had reported to duty, but his mind was elsewhere. Matt Bailey, it seemed, was a frustrated writer. The file drawer held a book-length manuscript.

  Mike Prescott reached for the smooth butt of his nine-millimeter Browning and trained it unflinchingly on the man cowering in the warehouse’s corner. He was a hard cop, and a ruthless one, and he had wanted Joey the Mark at his mercy for two years, ever since his partner had died screaming in a hail of bullets. Joey the Mark had pulled the trigger that put Jim Buckley down. All because of a sting that had gone sour. Now, Joey was feeling the terror that had filled Jim’s last moments; and Mike wasn’t about to show him mercy….

  What did they always say—write what you know? Bailey must have believed it.

  Merry scooped up the pages, tucked them under her arm, and went home to read in peace. Her visit to Margot St. John would have to wait until tomorrow.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Have a scallop, Merry,” Tess da Silva urged, handing her a plate and a napkin.

  The skillet-seared morsel slid from a toothpick into Merry’s grateful mouth, and she sighed with pleasure. “Is this wrapped in bacon?”

  “Pancetta. Much better. Try the phyllo, too, it’s got roasted peppers and chèvre in it.”

  “How can you do this after working all weekend?”