Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  “No,” Dr. John agreed. “I’d have guessed heart failure there.”

  Fairborn looked fresh from eight hours of sleep. He wore a white lab coat crisp with starch, and he was smoking a post-breakfast cigarette on the back porch of his house. His office was in the converted garage. When Merry found him, Fairborn was dictating rapid-fire notes into a handheld tape recorder. His hapless nurse was expected to transcribe and file his thoughts regarding each day’s round of patients. Judging by the pace of Fairborn’s patter, the poor woman probably arrived at five A.M.

  “Does it say there the lungs were paralyzed?” he asked, and took another drag on his cigarette.

  “Not explicitly.” Merry thumbed through the lab’s report. “There was air in them, so he went into the water breathing. What concerns me is not the ultimate cause of death, but the precipitating factors. Blue skin and needle marks. He must have been shot full of something.”

  “Cyanosis by way of a needle. It could be any number of things,” Fairborn mused.

  “I’m sure it could,” Merry said patiently, “but it would be helpful if you could narrow the options a little.”

  The doctor thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Okay. Let’s start with the commonplace. Anesthesiology.”

  “Anesthesiology,” Merry repeated slowly. “Yeah? So?”

  Fairborn tapped some ash into a planter and narrowed his eyes against the smoke. “An anesthesiologist sometimes uses drugs that produce mild cyanosis. And you can find them in most hospitals every day.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “They’re generally curare-based.”

  Merry frowned. “Wait a minute. Isn’t that the stuff from South America?”

  Fairborn laughed, a rare event. “Originally, yes. Indians used to rub it on their arrowheads. It shows up in Golden Age detective fiction a lot.”

  “Do-you read Dorothy Sayers, too, Doc?” Merry asked suspiciously.

  He ignored her. “Nowadays curare is produced in any number of drug labs under a variety of trade names, for use in the operating theater. A controlled amount will temporarily suspend the workings of the lungs, for example, during surgery. Or a certain dose will serve as a muscle relaxant. It’s a highly useful substance, actually.”

  “A deadly poison?” she asked skeptically.

  “Even aspirin is deadly if it’s abused, Merry. All drugs are poison—it’s just a matter of dosage.”

  “And semantics,” she said. “So this stuff is injected into the bloodstream?”

  “Hardly. That would kill a man.”

  They were both silent a moment, considering Jay Santorski’s punctured veins.

  “Is it detectable?”

  “Only in the tissues, through spectrographic analysis. The Golden Age detectives didn’t know about that.”

  “But access to curare must be controlled.”

  “It is. Although most controls can be circumvented by a nimble mind.”

  Merry tapped Fairborn’s arm with her half-glasses. “If you wanted to get your hands on curare, Doc, where would you go?”

  “To a doctor who could prescribe it. But he’d have to be a pretty good friend—and the kind who doesn’t ask questions. Or I’d steal it from my average urban hospital. That would require some inside knowledge, of course.”

  Unbidden, Barry Cohen’s face rose before Merry’s eyes. “Would it be available in a local pharmacy?”

  “Most things are. But as for curare specifically …” He shrugged. “I can’t help you. You’ll have to research that yourself.”

  Merry sighed and gazed pensively at the doctor’s dormant flower beds. He was a careful gardener; at least six inches of straw were heaped over the perennials, and burlap encircled the leafless rose canes. “This changes the whole perspective of the case.”

  “Does it? Santorski is just as dead. Someone still killed him.”

  “But it’s no longer a drug bust gone awry. Anyone with a grudge might have committed murder. I have to rethink everything.”

  “A drug bust? I thought it was just an overdose.”

  Merry smiled faintly. “That’s what we were all meant to think. Look, Doc—could the state crime lab sample the tissues for curare?”

  “If they haven’t already released the body.”

  Merry’s eyes widened with apprehension. “Oh, man. Can I use your phone?”

  “Hey, Starbuck,” Paul Winslow said.

  Will nodded from the hospital-room doorway. “You feel good enough to talk?”

  “Come on in.” Paul tossed a copy of Sports Illustrated on the floor and ran his fingers through his blond hair. It had been washed, Will noticed. Paul’s entire appearance was newly scrubbed and wan. His blue eyes were restless, and the skin beneath looked bruised.

  “Where’s Jor?” he asked.

  “Busy. I just came over on my lunch hour.”

  The truth was, Jorie’s mother had forbidden her to see Paul; but Will couldn’t tell him that. He pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed. “What are those two cops doing outside?”

  “The detective put them there.”

  “Merry Folger?”

  “Yeah.”

  Will flushed, remembering his whispered dispute with Jorie the previous evening. If Merry had taken charge of Paul, it was primarily Will’s fault.

  “She’s calling it protective custody,” Paul explained. “In case somebody tries to kill me.”

  Will sat back. “You’re kidding.”

  Paul eyed him steadily. “Two of my friends are dead.”

  “That guy Santorski—”

  “And Margot. His girlfriend. She was a friend of mine, too. Somebody killed her the other night.”

  The girl from the newscast. Paul had been screaming about her; screaming about blood. “I thought the scalloper drowned.”

  “Shut the door, buddy.”

  He did as he was told, and came back to Paul’s bedside.

  “Margot was a user,” Paul said. “Jay was trying to get her to stop. The cop thinks they were both killed, and maybe I’m next.”

  “Because …” Will let the word die away, and took a deep breath. “Because you know where to get heroin, right?”

  Paul nodded. “I used to get Margot’s for her.”

  Will considered this in silence. Then he said, “If I were you, Winslow, I’d get out of here.”

  The blue eyes slid away. “Oh, I’m okay. My dad’s shipping me off to this place in the Berkshires. Sort of a poor man’s Betty Ford. It’ll be great. Listen, Starbuck—”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know this cop?”

  Will’s stomach tightened. He didn’t want to explain why he had betrayed Paul to the police last night. He wasn’t exactly sure himself. For Paul’s own good? Or because he wanted him out of Jorie’s way? Probably both. Today’s visit was a form of penance.

  “I know her pretty well,” he replied. “She’s Peter Mason’s girlfriend. We were staying at Peter’s last night, before we brought you here.”

  “I remember. There was a dog, and a barn, and this guy who scared the shit out of me.”

  “That’d be Pete.”

  “So what’s she like?”

  “Merry?” Will frowned. “She’s pretty cool, actually. She caught the serial killer last year. Remember?”

  Paul shifted restlessly under his sheets. “Do you trust her? I mean, if she made a deal, do you think she’d keep it?”

  “Yeah.” Will put all his conviction in the single word.

  Paul closed his eyes and, despite the warmth of the room, shivered involuntarily.

  “You want to sleep now?”

  “I want to think,” he said, “and it’s almost time for my meds. That’s what they call them here—meds. I’m not drugged out, I’m medicated. Sick, huh, Starbuck? Reality’s all in what you call things.”

  Merry called the state crime lab, and learned to her relief that Jay Santorski’s body was still in the morgue. She asked the pathologist to s
ample both the scalloper’s and Matt Bailey’s tissues for curare-based drugs—or any other common pharmaceutical capable of causing respiratory failure. Intrigued, the pathologist agreed.

  On her way back to the station, she stopped at Cottage Hospital, which—in the form of Barry Cohen, its chief resident—insisted that all drugs removed from the dispensary were strictly accounted for. Even Merry’s suggestion of laxity bordered on the offensive, Barry implied, and it was with a fixed expression of displeasure that he showed her to the door. She toyed briefly with the notion of Barry killing Jay out of an uncontrollable desire for Sue Mornings tar’s undivided attention; but since the doctor had no reason to murder Bailey, much less bludgeon Margot St. John with a tomato can, she abandoned the idea. Not without some wistfulness.

  At Congdon’s Pharmacy on Main Street she received a highly documented response to her inquiry about curare. All prescriptions were registered in the pharmacy’s computer, and a painstaking search by generic and name-brand drug type showed there were no prescriptions registered for curare-based substances. A survey of the shelves showed that none was even kept in stock.

  It was, Merry reminded herself, a long shot. Dr. Fairborn had only been guessing at the substance that had killed the two men. In fact, any number of things might have been pumped into the veins of Jay Santorski and Matt Bailey. But what?

  What, other than the pursuit of heroin, did the two men have in common?

  As she stood in the wind of Main Street, her keys hanging idle in her hand, the answer suddenly came.

  Hannah Moore.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Despite the veil thrown over Jay Santorski’s identity, Matt Bailey’s operational file made perfectly clear that the scalloper had volunteered to collect evidence against Charles Moore. Merry had assumed, all along, that Jay’s role was a passive one; that he had gleaned information from the doomed Margot St. John, and merely passed it on, a willing conduit, to the authorities charged with drug-law enforcement. But Merry had neglected the hallmarks of what was, she saw now, a virulent obsession; she had failed to correctly interpret the signs. Jay Santorski had loved a girl named Katia. Katia had died too young, in suspicious circumstances, with a blot forever attached to her name. Jay had dropped out of Harvard. He had followed Margot—who was addicted to the heroin that had killed her roommate—to Nantucket. And he had set purposefully about his revenge.

  Jay had used Bailey, not the other way around.

  He had no intention of wreaking havoc in any personal, violent way. What Jay wanted was to witness Charles Moore’s ruin. He intended to strip this most respectable of men of his patrician heritage. Of his name. His fortune. And even his wife.

  Jay was acquainted professionally with Moore’s wife, who needed money for her research—money Moore earned from the sale of illicit drugs. Jay would have used his relationship with Hannah to shadow Moore. He would have infiltrated the household with his handsome, athletic body; charmed husband and wife with his intelligence and humor. He would have attracted and rebuffed the predatory Hannah, Merry thought, out of sheer enjoyment for the sport.

  He would have laid a thousand snares, collected his damning information, and awaited Bailey’s move.

  Only something else—something equally consuming—had intervened. And diverted Jay from his single-minded purpose. So that the day before his death, he had abandoned scalloping with Owen Harley, and spent arduous hours on ferries and bicycles in pursuit of an unexplained scallop spectrogram.

  Larval tigers, Merry thought. Viral morph/unobserved phenomenon. And then, Tiger Op. The notation on Bailey’s operational file. Was tiger simply their symbol for Hannah Moore? Or was its significance more complex?

  The only person left who might be able to tell Merry was Jay’s thesis advisor, Dr. Melrose Taylor.

  She pushed aside the incalculable, and surveyed instead that familiar mental landscape, dotted with the figures of Jay, Matt, and Hannah. The impetus to murder lay somewhere among them, like a dragon unwittingly roused. Had Jay discovered Bailey’s relationship with Hannah—so implicit in that last hurried phone conversation—and felt betrayed? Had he accused Bailey of compromising their operation, and the two come to blows?

  They could hardly have killed each other, simultaneously, Merry reflected with irritation. One had ended in the basin, after all, and the other in the trunk of his own car.

  She would have to retreat.

  To the tape itself.

  Merry had assumed, all along, that it was Charles Moore who had interrupted that last, and most interesting, phone call between his wife and Matt Bailey. She had pictured him arriving home too soon, while Hannah huddled over the receiver in a bath towel, damp and cooling. But Merry saw, now, her own stupidity. She had focused on identifying Hannah’s voice, instead of the man’s at the beginning of the tape…. What if that first message—the harried voice informing Hannah that the caller would be late—had been Jay, and not Charles Moore?

  She considered this possibility with rising hope.

  Fresh from his conference with Mel Taylor at Woods Hole, Jay calls Hannah Thursday morning and arranges to see her after work that night. He’s sent home early from Ezra’s, and so he rides out to Sconset and entrusts the spectrogram to Margot, with strict instructions that it should be passed on to Owen Harley. Jay stays at Margot’s longer than he intended, and so he calls Hannah again from the Baxter Road house. He tells her he’ll be a little late, but he’s on his way; that’s the first message the machine recorded. Jay is nervous about the meeting—his voice sounds a little harried. But whatever Jay learned at Woods Hole the previous day is too important to put off.

  He walks into the Moores’ kitchen while Hannah is still in the tub. Takes off his coat, shakes the ubiquitous rain out of his long hair. And then he hears the disembodied voices broadcast by the answering machine. (Merry adjured herself to find out where the Moores’ answering machine actually was. Somewhere on the first floor, almost certainly, since Hannah failed to recognize that her conversation was being recorded.) Jay listens as Bailey foolishly gives Hannah the power to warn her husband. And he sees months of work—of calculated fury—in pieces at his feet.

  He forgets the business of the spectrogram—the meaningful discussion about Hannah’s work—and snatches the tape from the answering machine. He runs back out into the night. He pedals away on his rickety old bicycle, which he has ridden from the Baxter Road house.

  The theory explained one thing, Merry thought with satisfaction—why the Moores had not simply erased their unfortunate tape. It had been stolen by an adversary first. But how had it ended up in a bag on the harbor bottom? Jay would have kept the thing, as evidence of Bailey’s complicity. He would have turned it over to the police, and demanded immediate action.

  Except, Merry thought with a chill, that he had drowned before he could.

  She went back to her office and braved the huddle of journalists grouped at the door.

  “Detective!” Sue Morningstar cried. “Does the Chief’s decision to give your case to the state police signal a lack of confidence? Are you considering resignation?”

  “Am I considering—” Merry stopped short, drew breath, and struggled for calm. “The disposition of cases is decided by the district attorney. You’ll have to refer your question to Dan Peterson.” She pushed her way to the door, fuming inwardly, and dangerously close to tears. Without even looking for her father, she fled up the steps to her office and slammed the door.

  On her desk was a note from Bill Carmichael, requesting the case files. She ignored it, and reached for a Cape Cod phone book.

  Two disconnections and three misroutings later, she reached Dr. Melrose Taylor in Woods Hole.

  “Jay?” the scientist cried. “Of course I’d love to talk about him. Can you get over this afternoon?”

  Merry glanced at her watch. She could just make the afternoon ferry to Hyannis, rent a car, and drive to Woods Hole. She had a few phone calls to make first. And the ca
se files to send over to Carmichael. If one has determined to circumvent the district attorney’s reallocation of one’s case, it is important to present the appearance, at least, of helpful compliance.

  “I’ll be there around four,” she told Taylor.

  • • •

  The storm that had been building all morning broke just as Merry was halfway across Nantucket Sound, out of sight of both the island and the Cape. She bore with being lost in a raging sea by reminding herself of the countless Folger generations that had rounded the perilous Horn, and arrived safely off the coast of China. Then she put down her book, forced her way through the swinging doors of the middle deck, and stepped out into the tearing wind. The Sound was a churning mass of viscous wave that looked almost solid. A sickly yellow light gleamed palely in its thrashing curves, the reflection of a hidden sun.

  It was unlikely, Merry thought, as she gauged the storm’s fury, that she would get back to the island that day. Unless she were willing to fly.

  At the mere thought, she shuddered.

  As the storm swept over the huddled gray buildings of Nantucket Island that afternoon, Peter Mason stepped out of his Range Rover and raced rapidly down the gravel path to Hannah Moore’s lab. He thrust open the hut’s door and ducked inside, shaking rain from his dark hair.

  “Peter!” Hannah stood up, smiling, and opened her arms wide. “How lovely to see you. What brings you out on such a dreadful day? You must be chilled to the bone!”

  She wore a pair of tortoiseshell glasses today that turned her unapproachable beauty ever so slightly academic. Still compelling, of course—but more honest. Hannah as she truly was, not the practiced and shining public relations expert. For a moment, recognizing the unvarnished dedication to science lurking somewhere behind those glasses, Peter was stirred to pity. She would not like hearing what he had to say.

  “I came to talk about my investment.”

  “You did?” she asked cautiously. She had been refused before.

  “I’m prepared to back fully half of your operational costs for the next eighteen months,” he said. “My support should serve as a springboard for additional investment—a consortium, perhaps, to cover the other fifty percent. Can you tap into that kind of venture capital?”