A rising wind tossed the shadows on his wall. Outside, the leafless vines rattled like a handful of bones.
Paul Winslow was asleep when the night duty nurse quietly opened his door. A light still shone on his bed, and a television flickered overhead in the corner, but the boy’s body was slack. His face was turned toward Merry, the lips slightly parted, and he looked, she thought, like the last person to have suffered the torments of the damned that evening. It was painful to destroy the utter peace of his repose, but she did it without a second thought.
“Mr. Winslow.” Merry shook his shoulder gently. “Mr. Winslow.”
His head rolled down to his chest and stayed there. She shook him a bit harder. The eyelids fluttered.
“Mr. Winslow, it’s Meredith Folger, of the Nantucket police. We met at the Easy Street Basin.”
He squinted at her vaguely, then rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Just after ten. I’d like to talk to you about the death of Margot St. John.”
Comprehension and pain came flooding into his face at once. Macbeth does murder sleep, Merry thought suddenly, remembering her grandfather’s mangled quotation of a few nights past. Paul Winslow thrust himself up against the pillows.
“You’re a cop?”
“Don’t you remember? You did some dredging for me the other day. After Jay Santorski drowned.”
He looked around him wildly, seized for an instant by pure panic. Merry almost attempted to restrain him forcibly, afraid he might take flight, but decided instead just to sit down. There was a chair waiting by the side of Paul’s bed, and she slid into it almost casually.
That seemed to calm him. He sank back against the pillows and took a ragged breath, his eyes fixed on her face. At least, he was probably thinking, she hadn’t come to arrest him.
Merry folded her hands on her lap and looked at him steadily. “Did you know that Margot was dead?”
Paul nodded once. “I saw you at the house.”
For an instant, Merry imagined him hiding in a closet while she stood on the back deck, peering into Margot’s ravaged kitchen. Then she dismissed the notion. “You saw me?”
“Last night. When they took her away. You came out right after the stretcher thing.”
“Gurney,” she corrected automatically. “So you were standing in the crowd.”
“On the edge of it.”
“I’m sorry we missed you.” As though it were a party, and she had arrived too late for conversation.
“How did she die?” Paul asked, swallowing hard.
This time, Merry didn’t bother to skirt the truth. “Someone bludgeoned her with a can of tomatoes.”
He winced and looked away.
“I know. It’s horrible and silly at the same time.”
Paul nodded and plucked at the hospital bedsheet. It was rough, starchy polyester, and blindingly white under the harsh lights. “Why are you here?”
“Because we found an ATM slip dated Saturday in her bedroom, Paul. It had your account number on it.”
From the blank disinterest on his face, he had missed the point of her words.
“The kitchen was torn apart, every sort of packaged food pulled down from the shelves, flour spilled out on the floor. Sugar in the sink, and baking soda, and talcum powder in a mess upstairs.” She waited, hoping the words would sink in. “Her killer was looking for something, Paul. Do you know what that might be?”
“Smack?”
“That’s what we thought, too.” Merry reached across Paul’s lap and lifted his left wrist in her hand. The unforgiving light picked out the graffiti of needle marks. “I guess you’ve been looking for smack yourself. Did you think Margot might have it?”
To her surprise, he laughed. “That’d be a change.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was the one who supplied her.”
Merry’s black brows furled suddenly. Paul Winslow’s name had never appeared in Matt Bailey’s operational file. “I thought you were brought in here tonight half out of your mind. Desperate for a fix.”
“That was a choice, ma’am. I decided to get myself clean. What heroin I had went into the harbor Saturday morning.”
He had called her ma’am. God, she must be getting old. “Paul—I’m going to be blunt. You’re in a bad situation. You were a friend of this girl’s, your property was found in her house, and you’ve said you were at the scene on the night in question. You’re a known heroin addict. As was Margot.”
“Okay,” he said, and clasped his hands together. Merry saw that they had started to shake. “I guess I need a lawyer.”
“You do.”
He smiled. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you, right?”
“Probably not. And I should have read you your Miranda rights.”
“Only if you’re charging me.”
“True.”
“Sol guess you’re not.”
Merry sat back and gazed at Paul steadily. “Not tonight. There’s a small matter pending.”
“Like linking me to the murder weapon?”
Merry raised one eyebrow.
“You never will.” He said it without bravado, as a bald statement of fact. “I didn’t kill her.”
“Then why were you hiding from the police?”
“Because somebody else did.” The words were sharp with fear, and a bit of rage. “They killed Jay, too. So who’s left? Me. I’m not about to end up dead in the harbor. I’m getting clean, and I’m getting out.”
Merry leaned toward him, her green eyes piercing. “Why would someone kill your friends, Paul?”
He shook his head violently. “I don’t know. Maybe because Jay wanted Margot to quit using. And they didn’t like it.”
“Who’s they?”
As she expected, her question went unanswered.
“Your theory might explain Jay’s murder,” she persisted, “but once he was out of the way—why kill Margot?”
Paul shook his head again, his eyes fixed on the humped shapes of his toes beneath the blinding sheets.
Merry sighed. “Look—I understand your fear.”
“I’m not afraid! I’m just not stupid! They’re two different things!”
“Okay—okay.” Merry thrust out her hands to stem the tide of wrath. “If you’re not afraid, you should be. Whoever killed Margot wants us to think she was murdered by you”
Paul’s blue eyes flashed up to hers. “But you don’t think that. You believe me.”
“I don’t think much, Paul, and I believe even less.”
“You’ve got to believe me! I wasn’t even near Sconset!”
“When?”
“Whenever it happened! I hadn’t seen Margot since Saturday morning, when we had breakfast. Before the dredging.”
“But you were there when her body was taken away. Why, Paul?”
For the first time, something like caution flickered across the boy’s face. “Just wanted to see her.”
“At dawn? Did you often show up at Margot’s house at that hour?”
He shrugged and averted his eyes. “Sometimes.”
Merry’s frown deepened. The atmosphere of frankness was slipping away. Paul was concealing something—out of fear, perhaps, or embarrassment. Or guilt. Had he gone to the house earlier in the evening and seen Margot’s body? And waited around until someone else came? Was it possible he had witnessed the murder? Or was he just afraid to tell Merry what he had wanted from the girl?
Time to get tough.
“Paul, you said you supplied Margot with heroin. Did she pay you for it?”
“Sometimes. Usually she was broke.”
“That could be damning in a court of law. If a jury decided that you were trafficking in an illegal substance—or conspiring to traffic—you could get five to twenty years in prison. It’s a much heavier charge than your basic possession.”
“We were just friends!” he protested hoarsely. “I wasn’t trying to make a buck off the stuff. I just passed it
on at cost, when she needed it.”
“Maybe so,” Merry conceded, “but a good prosecutor will turn that story against you. You’re in trouble, guy, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it. I wouldn’t want to see you spend the next ten years in prison.”
His face had been pale when she first entered the room, but at the moment it looked positively ghastly.
“It might help your situation if you decided to assist the police.”
“I didn’t kill Margot!”
“Maybe not. But you might be able to lead us to whoever did.”
The boy went very still.
“You got your heroin from someone. It didn’t just materialize out of thin air.”
“I’m such a chump,” Paul muttered. “Jesus, what was I thinking of?”
“You were thinking about murder. I want to talk about dealing. Who’s your supplier, Paul?”
He hesitated, then shook his head. “I just want out of this. It’s gotten too weird.”
“I know. I can help you do that.”
“They’ll kill me.”
“They? They wouldn’t be Hannah and Charles Moore, would they?”
Paul looked around desperately, as though his enemies were closing in. “I’m supposed to fly to the mainland tomorrow. Go into detox. I can’t deal with this right now.”
“You’re not going anywhere unless I say so.”
“Bullshit! My dad told me!”
“Your dad didn’t know you were implicated in a murder.”
“I’m not!”
“As of early this morning, buddy, you most certainly are.”
Galvanized by fear, he kicked off the covers and swung his legs out of bed; but the IV tube threaded into his right arm abruptly stopped him. “Christ,” he breathed, and reached for the aluminum trolley by his bedside.
Before he could stand up, Merry pressed a buzzer to summon the nurse.
“Two people are dead, Paul,” she argued fiercely. “If their killer thinks you’re a liability, nothing on God’s green earth is going to save you—”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“—except me.”
Brave words, but they had the power to make Merry shudder. She had failed to save the last man who had trusted her, after all.
A nurse appeared at Paul’s doorway and smiled at them both. “Those officers you were expecting are here, Ms. Folger. They’re in the waiting area.”
“Great,” Merry said. “We’ve decided to place Mr. Winslow in protective custody. They’ll be standing guard outside his door.”
Paul fell back on his pillows with a curse.
Merry reached into her purse and found a business card. She wrote her home number at the bottom and dropped it on the bedside table. “Use that anytime,” she told Paul.
“I guess I’m not going into detox.” His voice was bleak.
“You wouldn’t be any safer there,” Merry reminded him as she turned to go. “If someone wants to find you, kid, believe me, they will.”
Chapter Thirty-two
Tuesday morning, John Folger finally capitulated to the growing crowd of reporters, video cameras, and mobile broadcast units snarling traffic on Water Street.
He had almost avoided his office altogether, but Ralph Waldo’s silent disapproval urged an early departure from Tattle Court. He had scheduled a conference call with Dan Peterson and Bill Carmichael for eight o’clock in any case; and so seven-thirty A.M. found him toiling through the strident knot of journalists, who juggled their takeout breakfasts from Fog Island in one hand and their microphones in the other.
“There will be a statement at nine o’clock,” John barked, with something of his former imperiousness; then he shut the station door firmly in their unreconciled faces.
Sue Morningstar, the girl who had known Santorski, was still among them. She looked, John thought, as though she had camped outside all night, sacrificing a shower and a change of clothes for the public’s right to know. Or her own.
For a few moments he stood immobile before the front reception desk. Behind him, the 911 response station’s lights blinked reassuringly. What did the public need to know, exactly?
Jay Santorski’s voice as John had last heard it—apprehensive and young—drifted through his mind. He closed his eyes sharply against the memory Perhaps Merry was right, and he had no choice but to resign. To tarnish his unimpeachable record of service—nearly thirty-five years, counting his stint as a detective under Ralph—with the indelible admission of an unwitting guilt. It had all been a mistake, a juggernaut of error.
Should a man’s whole life be sacrificed to a single miscalculation?
Not without a fight. John stood a little straighter and smoothed his mustache. He would not go quietly into that great good night.
Merry, too, had arrived early for work. Her virtue was rewarded, as virtue rarely is, with a faxed copy of the state pathologist’s autopsy report on Jay Santorski. It sat innocently on her desk, inviting her to delve further into a case she was about to relinquish. She pulled out her chair and stared at it, debating. By rights it should go directly to Bill Carmichael.
“Hey, Mere,” Howie Seitz said from her doorway. “Clare got the crime lab’s results on the plastic bag you found in the harbor.”
She looked up, a faint line creasing her brow. “Yeah?”
“No prints on the hypo. They managed to pull two off the inside of the latex gloves, and they match a couple of lifts from the outside of the plastic bag.”
“What did the needle contain?”
“Seawater.”
“Seawater?” she echoed, and snatched up the pathologist’s report. While Howie waited, she skimmed it avidly. “I guess drugs are no longer the point, Seitz.”
“What’s it say?”
“There was no heroin in Jay Santorski’s body. Drugs didn’t kill him.” She sat down heavily in her chair, mind racing.
“But you can’t detect heroin in an autopsy anyway.” Disbelief from Howie, as though she had announced that Jay was still alive.
“You can’t. It decays to morphia. Clarence specifically asked the state crime lab to screen Santorski’s blood for it, and it wasn’t there.”
“So what was in his bloodstream?”
“Nothing they could detect.” She flipped to the third page of the pathologist’s report and shoved it under Howie’s nose. “There’s a lot of technical jargon that boils down to one conclusion. Jay drowned.”
“I knew a former member of the U.S. Crew Team who died of a heart attack,” Howie offered conversationally. “He was thirty-three.”
“This wasn’t a heart attack.”
“So it might have been an accident. He could have just … been dropped overboard, and unable to get back.”
Merry shook her head. “That might have worked if he were drugged, Howie. But not when he was in command of his senses. Why didn’t he kick his shoes and parka off, and head for shore? Even in cold water, he might have made it. He was a triathlete. He took care of himself. He wouldn’t just slip beneath the waves. Not without help.”
“And there are those needle marks,” Howie mused.
“The pathologist couldn’t explain them.”
“Isn’t there a Dorothy Sayers plot—”
Merry looked up, aghast. “You’ve read Sayers?”
He grinned. “Why do you think I became a cop?”
“Because you had no other option!”
“Oh, ye of little faith, and less imagination,” he retorted imperturbably. “Chief Inspector Parker was my hero from way back. Anyway, there’s this plot where a nurse goes around killing people with a syringe. Only the syringe is empty. She’s injecting air. And the air bubbles actually stop the heart.”
“That’s a myth,” Merry said dismissively. “Or at least an exaggeration. To make it work, you need a huge syringe, and even then, it rarely results in death. Besides, they’d have found air bubbles in Jay’s bloodstream and heart valves, even hours after death. There’s
no mention of those here.”
Howie flipped through the report. “Any mention of fibers in the wrist and ankle abrasions?”
“No fibers, but the areas of greatest trauma to the skin are compatible with the wrists having been twisted against each other. There’s even some subcutaneous bruising above the right anklebone, as though the left had worked against it. The considered opinion is that Jay was bound with an undetermined substance.”
“Maybe he had just strength enough to work his hands and feet free, before the cold overcame him and he drowned.”
“Maybe,” Merry said slowly. “But I’m not convinced. There’s something else at work here, I know it. We have to consider Bailey.”
“Because Bailey died the same way,” Howie reflected, “only Bailey didn’t drown.”
Merry nodded. “Remember the color of their skin?”
“Blue.” Howie shuddered.
“We thought it was from exposure, or maybe from the heroin itself. The lab thinks it shows cyanosis—oxygen deprivation.”
“They were killed by cyanide?”
“The pathologist would probably have found that.” Merry folded the report, slipped it into her purse, and headed for the door. “I’ve got to go talk to Fairborn right away, Seitz.”
“There’s a press conference in ten minutes,” he objected.
“At which point, the case is no longer ours. If my dad asks, just tell him I’ll be back in an hour.”
• • •
“Cyanosis? From drowning?” John Fairborn returned the pathologist’s report to Merry and grimaced eloquently.
“Not exactly. There’s Bailey’s murder, too. He didn’t die in the water.”
Death in a Cold Hard Light Page 27
