After Caroline

by Kay Hooper

  “It’s my job. On my office door, on a shiny brass sign, it says Sheriff. Says the same thing on my employment contract. The fine citizens of the town of Cliffside pay me to care when a tourist winds up smashed on the rocks.”

  Becket waited him out, then repeated, “Why does this matter so much to you, Griff?”

  Leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb, Griffin muttered a curse under his breath and then sighed. “It matters because I’ve got a sick feeling that kid had help going over the cliff. Tell me I’m wrong. Please.”

  “I thought it was just an automatic question when you asked this morning,” Becket said slowly. “What did you see out there that I missed?”

  “The ground was a bit churned up, that’s all.”

  “It had to be more than that. You wouldn’t assume murder on the strength of something that vague.”

  Both his job and his nature made Griffin unwilling to lay all his cards on the table, even for a colleague and friend, so he merely shrugged and returned an evasive answer. “I’m not assuming murder now. It could have been an accident, an argument that ended in the girl being pushed over the edge. I just want to know if I should be asking a different set of questions, that’s all.”

  After a moment, Becket let out a little snort. “Yeah, right. Which is why you haven’t even given me time to do the post.” He gestured slightly, waving away anything Griffin might have said in response. “Never mind. I’ve got enough worries on my plate without adding yours, thank you. Look, the preliminary exam didn’t show anything conclusive. I found bruises on her wrist that might indicate somebody handled her roughly just before she died, and a few more on her shoulder I can’t really explain. But nothing to say with any certainty that she wasn’t alone out there last night. I expect the post to confirm she died from injuries sustained in the fall.”

  “Can you tell me if she had intercourse before she died?”

  “We found her fully clothed,” Becket reminded him.

  “I know. But can you tell me if she had sex sometime in the hours before she died?”

  Becket shrugged. “Possibly. Definitely if she did and her partner didn’t wear a condom. You don’t suspect rape?”

  “Not really, since we found her clothed. But if you find any evidence of rape—”

  “You’ll be the second one to know.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  “Just go away for a while, will you? Except for the tox screen, I’ll have a complete report for you late this afternoon.”

  “The tox screen—”

  “In a few days, Griff. Go away, huh?”

  Griffin went away. He chose not to leave by the rear entrance of the morgue, or “loading dock,” where bodies were delivered for autopsies if death had occurred outside the clinic and were taken away to mortuaries afterward; even in a small town, death from accident or disease was a fairly regular occurrence, and there was something inherently depressing about those big, featureless double doors. Instead, he went upstairs and out the front of the clinic, waving to the nurse on duty at the desk but not pausing.

  He didn’t get into the Blazer immediately, but stood breathing in the crisp morning air and gazing around with the automatic attention of a cop. The small clinic was situated one street back from Main Street, one block over and behind the library, and had the entire block to itself. Beside and slightly behind it was the piece of land Caroline had bequeathed for expansion; Scott hadn’t wasted time in carrying out his wife’s wishes, having already cleared the land in preparation for the new wing even before her will was probated.

  Griffin didn’t think much about that. He absently noted that the bulldozers had apparently finished their part of the job, then got into the Blazer and headed back toward his office.

  It had been a hellish morning, and the sick feeling in his gut wasn’t getting any better. He’d felt as if a fist had punched him there when he had first glimpsed blond hair streaming over the rocks, when in that first terrible instant he had thought the dead girl was Joanna. The relief of discovering it wasn’t her had been curiously numbing, and it had taken seeing her, touching her, and talking to her, to convince him she was all right and to make him feel less paralyzed.

  But that sick feeling hadn’t gone away. From behind, Amber might easily have been mistaken for Joanna, especially on a dark night. She might even have sounded like her if she’d cried out during the final seconds of her life. A scream such as the one she might have screamed would have no drawling accent, no expressive music, no unique personality—it would just have terror.

  The only thing worse than being cursed with a vivid imagination, Griffin decided grimly, was to be cursed with an educated and experienced imagination. Amber had died violently; she might well have been mistaken for Joanna; and Griffin could see how it might have happened all too clearly in his mind.

  That was one of the drawbacks of being a cop, this inability to sugarcoat anything. He had often wondered what quality of the mind or emotion was required to deliberately choose to be suspicious on a daily basis and to subject oneself to sights most people would have the good fortune never to see. Like torn and battered bodies. What made cops?

  He knew the answer for himself, could easily pinpoint the place and time in his life when the urge to become a cop had taken root inside him. A summer he’d never forget as long as he lived had shaped him, he knew that. It had shaped him to hate evil, to mistrust more often than he trusted, to be suspicious of things that didn’t add up, and to loathe unanswered questions. That summer had turned him into a cop, even though he had been a kid of fifteen.

  He pushed the haunting memories out of his mind and forced himself to concentrate on what he had to do in the here and now. The first step, of course, was to gather information, as much information as he could. Then he would have to weed through everything, examine every minute detail of Amber Wade’s life and death.

  Asking Becket to check for any sexual activity prior to death was no more than a shot in the dark; Griffin didn’t believe Cain had been sexually involved with her, and she’d seemed too fixated on him to have been having sex with another man. Rape seemed very unlikely, not in the least because rapists didn’t normally dress their victims afterward. Though it was, of course, possible that she had been attacked, raped, and killed, then dressed and pushed over the cliff in an effort to make her death appear accidental. Still, given the weather last night, that seemed unlikely.

  But even if she had had sex sometime last night, where would the information get him? Her partner might have been a secretor, which would give them a blood type from semen left in the body—but so what? Without an admitted or suspected lover in custody, what good would that knowledge be?

  Brooding, Griffin parked the Blazer in its accustomed spot at the Sheriff’s Department and went inside. He was met outside his office door by Gwen Taylor, one of his deputies, and she followed him inside with her usual doleful expression.

  “I’ve got most of the statements here if you want to go through them, boss.”

  “Any surprises?” he asked, hanging up his jacket.

  She smiled. “That’d be too easy, wouldn’t it? Mark and Megan are beginning to fan out from The Inn just for the hell of it, knocking on doors and asking if anyone knew the girl, if anyone saw her yesterday or last night, but considering the weather—”

  “Yeah, I know.” Griffin took the statements from her and sat down behind his desk. “Did Neal find anything down on the beach?”

  Gwen shook her head. “Nada. If there was anything to find, high tide washed it away.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Gwen.”

  She went as far as the door, then paused and looked back at him. “Um, boss? Shelley’s still there at the hotel, and she says Mr. Wade has started asking when they can take their daughter’s body home.”

  Something inside Griffin’s chest tightened, and for a moment he couldn’t answer. A natural reaction of relatives, and one he’d seen before too many times. The urge to escape the scene
of death and horror, to go home and, please God, find it had all been just a terrible nightmare. Griffin tried to imagine what it must be like for a parent to have a child die by violence, then shied away from the attempt so violently that it was almost a physical movement. Not something anyone could imagine—or want to feel, he thought grimly. And then to know her body would be further violated by an autopsy…

  “Tell Shelley to be as vague as possible; there’s no need to say we’re waiting for the results of the postmortem. She can tell them we’re investigating the circumstances of their daughter’s death, that we’ll be as quick and thorough as we possibly can.”

  “What if they aren’t satisfied with that?”

  “Then I’ll talk to them.” He didn’t want to. God, he didn’t want to. Because there was nothing he could say to them that would help ease their pain. Absolutely nothing.

  Gwen nodded and left without saying anything else.

  Griffin looked after her for a moment, reluctant to begin reading statements he already knew would prove less than useless; he had good, well-trained deputies, and if they hadn’t noted anything of importance, he wasn’t likely to disagree with their assessment. He had to go over everything, of course, even if it was a waste of time.

  But he couldn’t help wondering if he was making a mistake in investigating Amber’s death as he would any other. Was Joanna right? Was the death of this teenage tourist connected in some way to the death of another tourist months ago—and to Caroline’s death?

  All his training and instincts said no. And so far, the evidence confirmed that. They’d only begun getting some information from San Francisco, both about Robert Butler and about Scott McKenna’s business dealings there, but so far there was no connection. And how Amber could be even remotely connected to either man was something Griffin couldn’t imagine.

  Other than the fact that all had died going over the cliffs, there was absolutely nothing to link those three people, or their deaths. But Joanna’s certainty, even based as it was on the intangible stuff of dreams, nagged at him.

  The simplest answer was usually the right one. But what if, this time, the answer was complex and obscure? What if there were connections between the three deaths, the three people, and those connections were so enigmatic or well concealed they could be glimpsed only in the soaring imagination of a dream?

  What if Joanna held the key to three deaths?

  And what if the wrong person knew that?

  It was midafternoon when Joanna came out of Landers’ Jewelry Store downtown. She was about to walk toward the library, where she had left her car, when she looked across the street and saw Griffin and Scott McKenna. Instinctively, without a thought as to why she was doing it, Joanna glanced both ways quickly and then crossed the street toward the two men.

  Although roughly the same height and build, they made an interesting contrast, she thought as she neared them. Scott was almost feline in his elegant, rather cold good looks, aloof and detached in the way cats often were. He was dressed in a dark suit unrelieved by any hint of color, and his face was expressionless.

  Griffin, casual as always in dark slacks and a light-colored shirt beneath his customary windbreaker, looked rugged, more powerful physically and, despite his own closed expression, curiously more animated than Scott, as if his life force couldn’t be contained or controlled as the other man’s seemed to be.

  They didn’t like each other. No, it’s more than that. Scott hates Griffin. Joanna felt it as she stepped up onto the sidewalk through a break in the railing near them, the iciness coming off Scott like wind off a glacier. But his voice was perfectly calm, even pleasant, when he spoke, obviously answering a question asked of him.

  “You’ll have to forgive me if I can’t recall a day more than four months ago, Sheriff. The interim has been … difficult.”

  “Butler died a few days after I saw you speak to him here in town,” Griffin said, ignoring the reference to Caroline’s death. But his voice held a note of tension. “I would have thought that would fix him in your mind.”

  “Afraid not. Sorry.” Scott smiled thinly. “I assume one of us must have asked the time.”

  Griffin looked rather pointedly at Scott’s left wrist. “You wear a Rolex, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  It was Griffin’s turn to smile thinly. “Butler wore one too. It was on his wrist when he died, and judging by the pale skin underneath the watch, he wore it all the time.”

  Joanna was standing less than three feet away from the little confrontation, watching and listening intently without making any attempt to hide her interest. She thought both men were aware of her, but their attention remained fixed on each other.

  Scott shrugged, just a bare lift and fall of his shoulders. “Maybe his kept time badly. Or maybe he asked me where he could get a decent cup of coffee. There were so many tourists around town then, I really don’t remember what one may or may not have said to me. But I do wonder why you’re asking about it now. I was under the impression that that investigation was closed.”

  “Maybe I closed it too soon,” Griffin said.

  Again, Scott shrugged. “That is, of course, your call to make. Reopen your investigation if you still have questions. But I can’t answer them for you. I never met the man.”

  After a moment, Griffin nodded. “All right. But we’ve had another death now. Another accident. Mind telling me where you were last night?”

  One of Scott’s eyebrows lifted slightly, but he remained otherwise expressionless. “At the house, naturally.”

  “Alone?”

  It seemed at first Scott wouldn’t answer. But finally he did, his voice a touch less pleasant than it had been. “Dylan and Lyssa were there until nine or so. After that, there’s no one to give me an alibi, if that’s what you’re asking. The housekeeper had retired for the night.”

  He didn’t mention his daughter, but Joanna assumed Regan had gone to bed by that time and that Scott didn’t feel that had to be explained. Then her attention sharpened as Scott went on.

  “I heard about the girl, of course. It’s a pity—but I didn’t know her. To my knowledge, I never even saw her. Satisfied, Sheriff?”

  “For now,” Griffin said.

  “Then I’ll be going.” Scott walked past Griffin toward Joanna. Those chilly gray eyes touched on her briefly, and he nodded slightly and said, “Joanna,” in remote greeting, but didn’t pause. He walked to the end of the block and turned the corner, presumably heading for his parked car, and vanished from their sight.

  “You’ve met?” Griffin’s voice was a bit harsh, and when she looked at him, it was to see him flexing his shoulders unconsciously, the way a man would who had held himself too stiffly for too long.

  Joanna halved the space between them and stood leaning back against the railing as she faced him. “Briefly. The other day, when I was talking to Regan at Caroline’s gazebo. It was a considerably less frozen encounter than this little meeting, I think.”

  He grimaced faintly. “That obvious, huh?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. A twenty-foot billboard with We Hate Each Other printed in giant letters would have made the point with more subtlety.”

  “I hope you’re exaggerating.”

  “Well … maybe a bit. But it was painfully obvious. Why do you think I crossed the street so fast? I had the odd feeling you two were about to start swinging. Tell me, who hates the other more, you or him?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “A nosy one. Want me to answer it? I think if Scott McKenna felt like running somebody over, you’d be first on his list. And I think you hate because you’re hated more than for any other reason.”

  “It’s a little hard to feel positive about somebody who hates your guts,” Griffin admitted.

  “And he hates your guts because… ?”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Griffin said with just enough firmness to make her disbeliev
e him. “But, to be honest, even if he wanted to be pals, I wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Why not?”

  Griffin looked as if he wished he hadn’t made that last comment. And sounded like it as well. “Never mind. Just a clash of personalities, I expect. As I assume you heard, Scott claims no connection with or knowledge of Butler, and claims to have been home all night alone. Something I doubt I could disprove even were I inclined to.”

  “Which you’re not?”

  Griffin shook his head. “Aside from the fact that I just can’t see Scott out behind The Inn in the middle of a stormy October night for any reason—and far less to push an eighteen-year-old girl to her death—there isn’t so much as a whisper of a connection between him and Amber.”

  Joanna wasn’t really surprised. If a connection existed, she had a hunch it was indirect and not easily visible. “You’re probably right,” she told the sheriff. Then, thoughtfully, she added, “You seem to be a lot more certain than you were this morning that Amber’s death wasn’t accidental. Are you?”

  “No. The postmortem found injuries consistent with death as the result of a fall. We’ll get a lab report in a few days that’ll tell us if she had any drugs in her system, but the doc tells me not to hold my breath.”

  Joanna frowned. “So there’s no evidence to indicate it wasn’t either accident or suicide. Then why did you question Scott McKenna so specifically about last night?”

  “All part of a standard investigation.”

  She looked at him a moment. “Oh? Do you normally ask someone completely unconnected to the victim if they have an alibi?”

  “When there’s even a remote possibility that this victim or her death might be tied in some way to an earlier victim to whom he did have a connection—yes.”

  “A remote possibility. I guess dreams and hunches fall under that heading.”

  Griffin was reluctant to admit that he was, in fact, searching for factual evidence to connect Butler to someone in Cliffside—in particular Scott McKenna. Unless he found that evidence, of course. So he merely said, “Well, they are outside the range of normal police work, you know.”