“Hello, Hannah,” she said, to his surprise. “Nice to see you again.”
“Hi.” Hannah pulled up the collar of her sheared beaver coat against the cold, and gazed at Peter, as though Merry hardly existed. “Think it over. But not for too long. I have to seek funding from someone in the next few weeks, and I’d like it to be you.” Her voice deepened slightly, as though she had just invited him into her bed—which, upon reflection, perhaps she had.
“I’ll be in touch,” he replied; and with a lingering caress from her gray eyes, Hannah Moore walked away.
There was an awkward pause as Peter watched her go; then he turned to Merry, and waited for her reaction.
“Ralph said he’d run into you.” Her voice was determinedly neutral.
“Right. At Marine Home.” He reached into his pocket for his keys. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
“Oh—no, thank you.” Merry took a step toward him, and then stopped, as though bewildered. “What’s wrong with you, Peter?”
“Nothing. Anything wrong with you?”
“Why haven’t you called me?”
“I figured you were busy. The drowning.” He kept his voice deliberately indifferent, and watched her black eyebrows furl. She looked exhausted, and worried, and as though she needed nothing so much as a kind word; and for a moment, he wished profoundly that he could take her back to Mason Farms and keep her there until she slept. But the impulse rankled as soon as it came; he would not be supportive to his usual fault. Merry needed to make her choice. Happiness with him, or misery with her work.
“That’s not true, and you know it.” She was angry, suddenly. “You’re trying to punish me for leaving Greenwich, aren’t you?”
“You’re under stress, Meredith.” He said it quietly enough, but he’d given the words an edge that could hardly be missed.
She brushed back her bangs in frustration. The winter day had turned cold, and the early dark was settling over the town; a light veil of snow whirled from the sky, and settled like lace on her hair. “Okay. Fine. Behave like a child if it makes you feel better. I have more important things to do than watch.”
“As usual.”
She rolled her eyes and started to walk past him. He tried to stop her, but she wrenched her arm angrily out of his grasp.
“One more thing, Peter,” she said, her voice brittle with anger. “Your lunch date. Hannah Moore. She was a little too cozy with both Matt Bailey and Jay Santorski, one of whom is missing, while the other is dead. Think about that before you call her again, okay? Just a word from your friendly neighborhood police officer.”
“What do you know about Hannah, Merry?”
“Not enough. But believe me, I will.”
She was twenty feet away from him now, and moving fast.
“Merry—”
No response, not even a sign that she had heard.
Peter stood there, alone in the thickening snow, with his feet slowly turning to ice.
Chapter Twenty-nine
By Monday afternoon, most of the lingering Christmas Strollers had at last departed for Westchester and Litchfield and Back Bay and Georgetown, taking with them a raft of shopping bags gaily strewn with colored tissue, framed canvases wrapped in brown paper, and gold chains strung with diminutive lightship baskets.
They left behind a slight sensation of anticlimax. Shopkeepers marked down clothing and pillowcases and china teapots made of basket-weave porcelain, then posed disconsolately before their plate-glass doors, and sighed as they surveyed the empty cobblestones beyond. Managers of restaurants harried their waitstaff, and made baleful and secret decisions over who should remain and who would be let go. The concierge at the Ezra Mayhew House spent an entire morning directing repairs to the garlanded decorations around the hotel’s front door, which had been partially destroyed by Fridays nor’easter, undeterred by the fact that Christmas, although three weeks away, seemed already to have come and gone.
A west wind bustled anxiously among the sodden shingle houses, as though it, too, had someplace better to be.
The scallopers were still plying the waters in their small open boats, with their steel gantries rocking above them like an army of empty doorways, and attempted with every hurl of the dredges to defy the course of nature. Owen Harley was among them; but he was seen to drift without decision, his winches stilled and his gaze fixed on the dying bottom.
Only the Unitarian minister, whose Christmas Eve madrigals were to be this year a thing of surpassing beauty, regarded the end of Stroll with complete complacency. His singers would devote more time to their music. They would follow his eyes intently as he stood at the fore of the church, and rose slightly on the balls of his feet to command the opening phrase. He smiled with satisfaction, already feeling the glow of winter candlelight and the faint inhalation of breath that preceded the burst of sound. He was unaware, it seemed, of the seasonal death of tourism, or of the insidious decay of the harbor’s waters, or of the brutal ends to two young lives. He was attempting to decide which sweater vest to wear beneath his gray tweed jacket.
The parking lot that comprised the bulk of Steamboat Wharf was conspicuously empty. Not for December the frantic jostling of an August day, when tickets bought eight months before were fingered like pieces of the true cross. The weekend hordes had come and gone, and left a single car becalmed in the post-holiday silence. A shabby old VW bug the color of faded denim, it sat in the wharf’s small front parking lot overlooking the terminal. Its windshield was cracked and spotted with rain, and one wheel hub had been replaced by an unpainted panel that gleamed through the morning fog like a bare bone.
Mona Baldock pushed back the hood of her navy-blue Steamship Authority slicker and stared narrowly at the car. It was not one she had flagged off the ferry ramp from the first boat that morning, or the single boat this afternoon; and when she considered the matter, she was almost certain that it had been parked in its spot for several days. Mona glanced at the ferry terminal doors, where her boss’s head was bent over an unlit cigarette. He hated people using the wharf’s lot illegally. So Mona started to walk toward the car.
It was possible to send unaccompanied vehicles over to Nantucket for a small fee, although it was a practice the Authority discouraged. It was more common in summer, when ferry reservations were tight, and cars sometimes traveled standby. The owners would cross on a morning ferry, and an Authority employee would bring their cars over at midnight, or early the next morning. The owners were expected to retrieve their vehicles from the terminal lot a few hours after arrival. The VW, Mona realized, had been overlooked in the rush of Christmas Stroll crossings.
She was maybe two yards from the driver’s side door when a sudden gust off the water buffeted the car. A smell so foul, so unlike anything Mona had ever experienced, wafted over her. She let out a small yelp, turned her back on the car, and bent double as though from a blow. Then she fled without a backward glance toward the safety of the Authority’s offices.
Running into Peter Mason with the Faye Dunaway-esque Hannah Moore on his arm was probably the only fitting end to what had been an utterly lousy day. After leaving Owen Harley, Merry had spent most of the afternoon attempting to reach Margot St. John’s parents. She had succeeded at last in wresting the father from a business conference in Manhattan. He was annoyed at the interruption, and then devastated by the news. Merry had never before been forced to endure a grown man’s sobbing over the telephone, and she hoped never to experience it again.
It didn’t help, Merry thought, that she was tired and seemed to have a cold coming on, or that her jacket still smelled faintly like Owen Harley’s fishing shack. It was just Fate’s kind of joke, to throw Peter her way when she was at her most defenseless.
Walking now into the police station without a glance to left or right, almost oblivious to the calls of greeting thrown out by her colleagues, Merry wondered what plans Hannah had for Peter Mason. She wanted his money, of course—but would Hannah Moore stop there?
>
“Detective!”
“Hey, Seitz. Any news of Paul Winslow?”
Howie shook his head.
“Come on up to my office.”
He followed her there, rendered mute by the black look on her face, and waited while she fished out a phone book. “Call this number, and ask for Will. He should be home from school by now. Then ask him for the name and number of Paul’s girlfriend. She might have an idea where he’s gone.”
“Okay,” Howie said briefly, and lingered in the door. “You all right?”
“I’m just fine.” Merry slammed the phone book on the desk for emphasis. “How ‘bout you? It can’t have been easy to see Margot like that.”
Howie averted his eyes. “I didn’t sleep at all. And right now, I feel like hell.”
“Then go home after you make that call. By the way, Seitz—anything come in from the state lab about Santorski?”
“Clarence thinks it’ll be a few more days. Wednesday, maybe.”
“What do those people do with their time, anyway?”
“Clare dusted the plastic coating on the bike chain,” Howie said helpfully. “It’s got a bunch of prints on it, some of ‘em smudged—”
“That’s really great, Seitz. That’s just what I needed to hear.”
“—and two of them, a thumb and forefinger, match the lifts he took from Jay’s body.”
Merry’s restless rifling of her desk papers stilled, and she looked up. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not.”
She came around the desk like a banshee and caught the patrolman in a bear hug. “That’s fabulous, Seitz! That almost certainly means the bike accident was faked. You realize that, don’t you? Somebody cut the chain and tossed bike and all into the water, after they dumped Jay out by the jetties.”
“Speaking of dumping,” Howie said quickly. “I followed up on that information of Irene’s. You remember—the woman on Old North who thought she heard a boat in the middle of the night. I asked Harley where he kept his scallop boat’s key. He hung one on a hook just inside his door. Jay had another. It wasn’t found on his body.”
“And it wasn’t in his room. Someone took it after Jay was bound hand and foot, and used the boat to get rid of him. It’s probably resting comfortably on the bottom of the boat basin.”
“’Fraid not, Mere. Harley found it in the ignition Friday morning. He thought Jay had left it there Thursday afternoon, and he was pretty pissed at Jay’s stupidity. He didn’t go out on the water that day because of the nor’easter, so he took the key upstairs and never thought of it again. It was only about an hour later that the Coast Guard pulled Jay’s body out of the water.”
“Any prints it might have had will be botched beyond recognition,” Merry said bitterly.
Before Howie could reply, Clarence Strangerfield peered around his elbow from the dimly lit hallway. “Howie. Marradith.”
There was an expression of gravity in his soulful brown eyes that even Howie couldn’t miss. The patrolman sidestepped into Merry’s office and Clarence’s round form filled the doorway.
“What is it?” Merry asked.
“Matthew Bailey.”
“You’ve found him?”
Clarence nodded.
Merry pushed back her desk chair, her eyes trained on the crime scene chief’s face. “It’s that bad?”
“Ayeh.”
“Dead.”
“Several days.”
Merry closed her eyes. “Oh, God. Poor little Ryan. Have you told Tim Potts?”
“He’s-calling the boy outta school right now.”
Her eyes flew open. “You’re not going to make him identify his dad?”
“O’ cahrse not.” Clarence lowered himself creakily into a free chair. “Matt was stuck in the trunk of his cahr. All folded up in alight ball. It was a vee-dubbyah, Marradith, as you’ll remembah, and they don’t have much trunk space. In the front, where a narmal cahr’s engine’d be.”
Merry exhaled deeply and shoved a hand through her bangs.
“Who found him?” Howie asked.
“Steamship Authority. They thought somethin’ was funny ‘bout the cahr. Then they got near enough to smell it…”
“At least it’s been pretty cold,” Howie said lamely.
“That’ll help the doctahs.”
“How did he die?” Merry asked Clarence.
“I’m thinkin’ the same way as young Jay.”
“Injection?”
He nodded. “Same blue colah to the skin, same wide-open eyes. Maybe poor Matt even died the same night, who knows? Certainly not Fairbahrn. What with the decomposition o’ the body … but I’m sendin’ it straight ovuh to Bahston.”
“Does the Chief know?”
“Went to him furhst. But you’re handling Santorski’s death, Marradith,” Clare said steadily, “and I thought you ought to know. Whatevah the Chief decides.”
The Chief, Merry thought, had decided to accept her resignation from the investigation of Santorski’s drowning. But she didn’t need to spell that out for Clarence right now. Like her, he was probably in official ignorance of Santorski’s undercover drug work for the Nantucket police; but he was too wise not to make a sum of these troubling parts.
And if the crime scene chief was doing that, so were Howie Seitz and Tim Potts and everybody else on the Nantucket force.
“Did you find anything else in the car?” she asked him distantly.
“Some trash. Couple o’ soda cans and some old potatah chip bags. We vacuumed for fibahs, o’ cahrse, and we’re sendin’ the clothes to Bahston.”
“Right.” Merry turned her back on Clarence and Howie, her eyes fixed on the patch of Federal Street she could see from her window. She should feel a mix of emotions, she knew—sorrow for a fellow human being, outrage at the death of a colleague, sympathy for Matt Bailey’s young son. Instead, she felt only fear. And this time, it was for her father.
The scene outside John Folger’s office might have been scripted from a television drama. Sue Morningstar, notebook in hand, had pinned Janelle Taylor against the Chief’s door. Merry stopped short a few feet from the pair, pitying them both.
“Detective Bailey has been dead some time, isn’t that correct?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“The Inquirer & Mirror has learned that he was, in fact, missing since last Thursday, and that nothing was done to find him. Could you comment?”
“No. I really think, Ms. Morningstar—”
“Are the murders of Margot St. John and Detective Bailey linked to the mysterious drowning of a young scalloper Thursday night?”
“You’ll have to wait for the Chief’s statement.” Janelle smoothed her cardigan flat over her hips, an admission of nerves.
“When is he planning to speak?”
“Hello, Sue.” Merry advanced with her right hand extended. “I should have called you about Margot. Please forgive me. I haven’t had a spare moment to think.”
Sue whipped around like a dervish. “Detective Folger! Thank God! Maybe now I’ll get some real information.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got to see my father.”
“But, Detective—”
Janelle slid away from the door, and Merry slipped inside. A tide of protest harried her footsteps.
John Folger was sitting motionless at his desk. The blotter and in-box were cleared of paper. He looked up when Merry entered the room, then averted his eyes. “You heard.”
“Me and everyone else on-island, by dinnertime.”
“Who is that girl?”
“Sue Morningstar. Santorski’s roommate. I’d say she’s out for blood.”
He did not reply. His eyelids flickered, as with an overpowering weariness.
“What’re you going to do, Dad?”
The Chief shrugged. “That’s up to Dan Peterson. He’ll probably turn all three investigations over to the state troopers.”
He was right, of course. It was the DA’s only feasible d
ecision, once Bailey’s ties to Jay Santorski were public knowledge. An undercover operation gone wrong would taint the Nantucket force; they could not be trusted to investigate their own. And the deliberate delay and obfuscation—which must inevitably come out once the matter fell into other hands—would destroy the Chief’s authority.
“That’s not quite what I meant.” Merry steeled herself to the unpleasantness. “I asked what you were going to do.”
Her father stared at her blankly.
“The press will savage your reputation.” She jerked her head toward the door. “That girl out there is just the beginning. We can expect the Boston television stations in another few hours. What are you going to say?”
“I don’t know.” His head sank into his hands. “I just don’t know.”
“You’ll have to resign.”
That got his attention. The blue eyes met Merry’s own, blazing. “For one mistake? After a lifetime of service any man should be proud of?”
“After three murders, Dad. After all the lies and denial.”
The blaze in the eyes faded. “I can brave it out. The people on this island believe in me. They should, by God. I’ve never been anything but a figure of trust.”
“Which is why you’ll have to go.” Merry walked slowly toward her father’s chair, then crouched down by his side. “Someone has to tell you this, Dad. Better it should come from me than from Dan Peterson. Or the selectmen. Or, God forbid, the barracudas of the press.” She reached for his hand.
He shook it away. “Get out of here, Meredith.”
She reared back as though she had been slapped. “Do you think I like this? It tears me apart. I’ve hated this whole business from the moment you tossed it in my lap.”
“It’ll blow over,” he muttered. “It’ll be resolved. The one thing that ties these three deaths together is heroin. The girl took it, the boy was trying to stop it, and Bailey got in the middle. Bill Carmichael should make short work of it.”
Bill Carmichael was the head of Nantucket’s small detachment of state troopers. He would have Merry’s case in the morning. A sharp access of bitterness—the recognition of the entire weekend’s futility—brought Merry to her feet. “I’m sure Bill will tie things up nicely, Dad, once you give him those files you’ve got tucked under my bed. But it won’t save your job. Bailey’s work was for nothing.”
Death in a Cold Hard Light Page 25
