Dying for Murder

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  It took me awhile to find Duncan’s medical bag — he wouldn’t leave without it — and it took Duncan a long time to get down all those stairs. Getting his leg up and over my bike to straddle it left us both sweating but he did it, and we made it back to the station as the wind strengthened. I wondered how much stronger it would get and decided that that line of thinking was counterproductive. I led Duncan straight to Stacey’s cabin but it took me awhile to key in the combo since the rain kept getting in my eyes. I had left my goggles at Duncan’s.

  Duncan was getting impatient by the time I finally got it. “Dear Cordi, that lock wouldn’t stop a feather.”

  This time I had a response to that observation. “It’s the authority it represents that counts,” I said. I left him there with his medical bag to go and get help with Stacey and find out where Duncan could sleep for the night. Outside was a howling madhouse and getting worse by the second as I braced myself against the wind and staggered to the stairs. It must have been 6:00 in the afternoon — dinnertime — but it felt more like 10:00 because it was so dark.

  I struggled up the stairs and into the dining room, shutting the door on the hurricane with relief. The room was full. Everyone seemed to have congregated here rather than be alone in their cabins, or maybe they were just waiting for dinner. Darcy caught sight of me, and extricated himself from a conversation with Sam, and came to join me.

  “Duncan’s down with Stacey,” I said. “We need help carrying her up.” I scanned the room. This was not the time for women’s lib — this was the time for male strength. Wyatt and Darcy were there and so were David and Trevor.

  “People,” Darcy’s voice rang out and the rumble of conversation ceased. “The coroner’s here and he’s looking at Stacey right now. We need a contingent to help carry her up to the fridge. I’m in. Who else is?”

  David put up his hand. I looked over at Trevor, who shrugged and said, “Bad back. Sorry.” I wondered if a shrimper could shrimp with a bad back. I looked at Wyatt, who just stared at Darcy as if he was a particularly interesting species of cockroach.

  Darcy stared him down and said, “Wyatt?”

  Wyatt dragged a hand down his face. “In the interests of all our backs, not to mention crime-scene protocol, I think she should stay where she is until the police come.”

  Darcy hesitated and then regrouped. “In the interests of dignity, she needs to be brought up here.”

  “Has anyone called the police on this one?” retorted Wyatt.

  Darcy inclined his head at me and I had one of those moments of panic when you are not sure what to say. I had forgotten to try after that first attempt.

  Darcy coughed and turned back to Wyatt, after giving me a wild glance. “There’s no cellphone service,” he said.

  “Rather convenient, isn’t it?” asked Wyatt.

  “I’m not sure what you are getting at.”

  “Maybe you murdered Stacey or Ms Cordi O’Callaghan did and destroying the crime scene will destroy any evidence against you.”

  Darcy stood with his jaw resting on his chest and I leapt in. “Every inch of Stacey’s cabin and Stacey herself has now been systematically photographed and the pathologist is looking at Stacey right now. We will only be moving her — the rest of the crime scene will be intact.”

  “Don’t get your knickers in such a knot,” said Wyatt with a smile, which of course just made me more defensive. “Let’s get on with it or we’ll miss dinner,” he said. I looked over at David to see his reaction to all this but he had turned his back to us and was peering out the rain-soaked window.

  “Whoever helps with Stacey is excused from helping to make dinner tonight,” said Darcy. I raised an eyebrow at him. It seemed a rather insensitive thing to say, given the circumstances. He misconstrued my raised eyebrow and said, “The cooks left on the last boat.”

  That meant we’d all have to pitch in to feed ourselves. I wondered for a moment what sort of meals these disparate people were capable of making. Food has its own fingerprints, its own life, and it could reveal a lot about a person. Meat and potatoes: conservative, doesn’t like surprises; spicy food: a traveller, adventurous; raw squid and goat’s blood: an extreme eater. But on second thought maybe it was less like fingerprints and more like astrology.

  “Time to go get Stacey,” said Darcy and headed for the door. As I stepped outside after him it was as if nature lay coiled like a snake waiting to strike, her ragtag band of wind and rain and clouds all waiting in the shadows, ready. Someone gripped my shoulder hard and said, “Stairs are for walking down.” I turned and caught a glimpse of Wyatt behind me before I headed down the stairs.

  I caught up to Darcy at the bottom of the stairs as he tried to skirt the large puddle that had sprouted there. “Why haven’t you called the police?” he asked, trying to keep his voice flat and cold but failing miserably. He was just too friendly a guy to hold grudges.

  “There really was no cell service,” I said lamely. “And then I forgot.”

  “How can you forget something as momentous as murder, unless perhaps you wanted to.” He pinned me with his accusing eyes.

  “Jesus. You think I killed her?” I squawked. His face softened as he looked at me and shrugged, but he didn’t retract the question and I didn’t deign to answer.

  Duncan was sitting on Stacey’s bed, writing in a notebook, when Darcy opened the door and we both walked in, leaving the rest of our contingent standing in the doorway — there wasn’t enough room for them to come in. I introduced them all to Duncan, who nodded his head in acknowledgement and said, “She was suffocated.”

  Wyatt snorted and loudly whispered, “We knew that already.”

  Duncan looked up and stared at him. Even an iron rod would have withered under that look, but Wyatt was unfazed and just snorted again.

  “As I was saying,” Duncan continued, “she was suffocated. Probably around 3:00 a.m., judging by her core body temperature.”

  He looked at me. “Looks like we have another murder, Cordi.”

  “Another?” asked Wyatt in a startled voice.

  “He doesn’t mean another one here on the island,” Darcy said defensively.

  “God, no,” said Duncan as he eyeballed Wyatt. “Cordi here has two solved murders under her belt. I was referring to those.”

  Wyatt made a point of looking at my belt, but he kept quiet. I looked at them all standing there and wondered if any of them was about to help carry up the body of the woman they had murdered. It sent a jolt through me to realize we were trapped on a deserted barrier island with a murderer roaming free. Darcy cleared his throat and said, “Let’s move her.”

  She was in full rigor. The four of us each took a leg or a shoulder, but she was stiff and unwieldy and very heavy. As I struggled with my side of her we exited the cabin and headed for the stairs. Duncan had tried to take my place but I had vetoed him — not only was he terribly unfit with a heart condition but he had just sustained a blow to his legs and his ego, both of which must have been painful. He contented himself with directing us up the stairs, which were suddenly way narrower than I remembered. We carried Stacey, frozen into position as if sitting in a chair, which of course she had once been, and made it up the stairs without a stop — not that we could have stopped even if we had wanted to. Putting her down on the stairs would have meant picking her up again.

  We arrived in the dining room, hot, dishevelled, and out of breath. We sat her down in a chair and stood back to catch our breath. She sat there with her chin on her chest as if she had dozed off. She was wearing very feminine pink rose pajamas, and I wondered with sadness if she had ever worn them for someone else or were they just for herself, or for the memory of someone long gone, or someone long lost? I could see her raw, bare wrists and the MedicAlert necklace grasped in her hand. Her feet were bare. Had she been awakened to her death or had she already been awake to confront her murderer? Had she struggled? I thought back to the cabin before we mucked it up. It hadn’t looked as if a s
truggle had taken place. That might have been because of the chloroform.

  “Let’s get this done, folks,” said Darcy, interrupting my line of thought.

  Someone had cleaned out the cooler and it was pretty straightforward moving her in there. I wondered how many times she had come to this very cooler for a pop or a sandwich and if she had ever had even an inkling that she would end up here, beside the cheese and the Diet Pepsi. It was somewhat anticlimactic afterward, when we gathered outside the cooler. We all had a drink together but everybody was guarded because the one topic we all wanted to talk about was fraught with fear and guilt. We each drifted off and I wandered down the hall to call the police in privacy. I’d put it off for long enough, and I wondered if Darcy really believed I had killed her based on the fact that I hadn’t called the police.

  I poked my nose into an empty lab and sat down at a desk full of papers. I picked up the phone. I was actually surprised to get a dial tone and nearly hung up, but I resisted the urge — after all, the phone call had to be made. When I said I had a murder to report I was put through to a Detective Kennedy. While I was waiting I scanned the desk I was sitting at. There was a paper poking out from inside a medical textbook. I tugged on it, glanced about guiltily, and then looked at it. It was a lab report with Sam’s signature, detailing the makeup of some substance that was foreign to me. And a second sheet with a diagram of a chemical formula. The results looked benign and I lost interest as Detective Kennedy came on the line.

  “Tell me everything,” he said, and I could hear the soft tap-tap sound of a computer keyboard as he inputted my somewhat creatively edited story. He interrupted me a number of times to clarify some things and then said, “It’s anarchy here on the mainland. I won’t be able to send a team out for at least three days. We’re too busy rescuing the injured to do anything about the dead.”

  “Three days?” I asked, thinking about Stacey in the cooler.

  “You’ll need to secure the crime scene. Don’t touch anything, or move anything until we get there.”

  Okay. So I forgot to tell him everything, I thought, wondering what to say now. I thought about Stacey and blurted out — “What about Stacey?”

  “Who’s Stacey?”

  “The murder victim,” I said impatiently.

  “The alleged murder victim,” he said, and I made a face at the phone. “Don’t touch her.”

  “But it’s forty degrees Celcius outside,” I pleaded.

  Before I could say anything more he begged off saying he had an important call coming through and he had to take it.

  I hung up and stared at my cell, thinking about Stacey and the cooler. And what the cops would say when they heard the truth.

  chapter eleven

  I was lost in thought and not trying very hard to get found when I heard someone clear their throat. I looked up to see Wyatt leaning up against the door jamb. I wondered how long he had been there. Instinctively I picked up the lab report and then realized I couldn’t exactly put it back where I found it with him standing there staring at me.

  “Do you always snoop around other people’s desks?” He smiled at me, slow, easy, and nasty.

  “Do you always sneak up on people unannounced?” I retorted.

  “Always,” he said, the smile now reaching his eyes.

  “And is that what you were doing when you sneaked up on Stacey and murdered her?” I surprised myself by saying that. I had no evidence to justify the question, especially framed in that way.

  I could see the muscles of his cheek start to vibrate as he clenched his jaw. “I was nowhere near her when she died,” he said, his voice low and even. He stared at me. “You have your fucking nerve to accuse me of murder,” he added, his anger barely under control.

  “Where were you when she died?”

  He suddenly laughed. “Depends on when she died.”

  “About three in the morning.”

  I could see the contempt in his eyes as he decided whether to answer me or not.

  “Three in the morning.” He laughed again. “Where the hell do you think I was at that hour?”

  He was digging in his heels for some reason so I took another tack. “Who hired you to come and do the vaccinations?”

  He was taken off guard by my change of topic and bit his lip, either in exasperation or annoyance. “The Island Association. They were given a mandate to get the horses vaccinated so they wouldn’t get pregnant. I complied.” He raised his hands and shrugged at the same time, the anger gone like a water drop in fire.

  “I understand there were a lot of islanders against the vaccinations.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe Stacey was against the vaccinations and you didn’t like that.”

  He looked at me and laughed. “What sort of godforsaken motive is that?” He laughed again, pushed off from the doorframe, and held out his hand at me. I frowned. “Could you hand me the medical text, please?”

  I glanced down at it. It was a book on neurodegenerative diseases and Stacey had stuck her address label on it. I took a deep breath. So this was Stacey’s desk and here was Wyatt wanting something from it before I had had a chance to search it, or at least before the police had.

  “I’m no expert but I think it had better just stay where it is until the police come.”

  He slowly dropped his hand and then raised it in a salute. “Your wish is my command,” he said, but something stirred behind his eyes like a monster shifting in its sleep, and I watched with some misgiving as he vanished into the hallway, half expecting him to come back and harangue me some more.

  I reached for the medical text, wondering why he was so interested. Or perhaps it was because of what was in it — the lab report with the chemical formula. It occurred to me that maybe Stacey had hidden it for some reason. I pulled out the sheet again and looked at it, but my organic chemistry wasn’t up to it. I looked at Stacey’s computer and realized I couldn’t even search the Internet for the formula because it was a diagram. On impulse I folded and pocketed it. I glanced outside. The wind had died down and the rain had stopped. It was dinnertime, but I didn’t feel like eating after seeing Stacey dumped in the cooler so I closed her door and then couldn’t figure out how to seal the room from intruders.

  “Just about everyone has access to all these doors.” Darcy was walking down the corridor toward me and doing a good job of reading my mind again.

  As he approached he pulled out a hasp lock like the one we had used on Stacey’s cabin, and began screwing it into place.

  “It seems ridiculous to do this,” he said, “but I guess with Stacey’s killer still out there it’s for the best.” He put the screwdriver back in his pocket and fished out another pint-sized lock with two keys. He handed one key to me, hesitated a moment, and then handed the other one to me as well.

  “Best you keep them both,” he said. “I don’t want anyone accusing me of tampering with the evidence and you are pretty much in the clear for this murder.”

  “That’s not what you said earlier,” I pointed out.

  He sighed. “Sorry about that. I was kind of traumatized. In hindsight it’s pretty hard to believe that you would kill a complete stranger and have no motive, unless of course you are a contract killer?”

  I laughed. But I had the strange feeling that he was half in jest and all in earnest.

  I changed the subject. “Can you walk me through the evacuation protocol?”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Who gets the call to evacuate?”

  “We’ve already been through this.”

  “Humour me.”

  “Stacey gets the call and then she alerts me and I’m supposed to organize everybody.”

  “So what happened the other night? How did she sound?”

  I saw a look of puzzlement and then something else flit across his face before he said, “She texted me.”

  “She texted you? Something as important as that and she texted you? Why didn’t you sa
y that earlier?”

  “Yeah, it does seem odd now that you mention it, but she knows I carry my cellphone everywhere I go and that I wouldn’t miss a call. My beeper sounds like a turbo jet at that hour of the morning. She just told me to take care of the evacuation, that she was going to stay and take care of the station.”

  “Why did you ask me to go and get her then?”

  “I was hoping she’d change her mind.”

  He shrugged and started to turn away.

  “What was the last text message from her besides the evacuation alert?”

  “Why would you want to know that?”

  “Because maybe we can pinpoint the time of death better.”

  “She didn’t text me but she did call me around 11:30.” He laughed.

  “She said she had spilled her box of crickets all over the floor and they were driving her crazy. She wanted to know if I had any useful ideas of how to get them all.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. I just told her she’d have to stomp on them. I couldn’t stop laughing though. Those crickets are as loud as hell.”

  “What was she doing with a whole bunch of crickets?”

  “They were Roger’s food,” he said unhelpfully. When I looked puzzled he said, “Her snake.”

  “I never saw a snake in her cabin,” I said.

  “I let Mel take it.”

  I wondered what else he’d let people take before I’d secured the scene, but I dropped it and said, “Do you know if she had any enemies, anyone who would want to kill her?”

  He looked at me strangely, and I thought maybe he hadn’t heard, but he sighed and said, “She had people who didn’t like her, but no one who would have wanted to kill her. I mean, that is kind of drastic, isn’t it?” He pinned me with his moss green eyes and then looked away. “I’ve got to go.”

  I touched his arm and he turned back to me, struggling to control his impatience.

  I pulled out the little diagram and carefully unfolded it. “Do you have any idea what this means?” I handed it to him and was surprised by the furtive look on his face as he took it from me.