The door rattled louder, followed by rapping.
Alexa jerked back in the chair, fumbled for her cell, tapped Bruce’s number with shaking fingers.
No service.
Godforsaken island.
She was halfway to the landline on Wallace’s desk when the rapping moved from the door to the window. White knuckles knocked against the pane. Rap, rap, rap. “Open up,” said a man.
The voice jarred Alexa. This was a police station. Someone needed help. “Who is it?” she called.
Garble, mumble.
“Who?” She stabbed 1-1-1 on the landline.
The windowpane rattled. A face moved in. “Stephen Neville.”
It couldn’t be Neville. Bruce and Wallace and the team are hunting him down at Observation Rock. But the ranger’s face solidified like a mugshot through the glass. She hung up before an operator answered and moved to the door, undid the deadbolt, pulled it open.
Stephen, gaunt and diminished in wet jeans and T-shirt, longish hair plastered to his skull, stepped from the window.
Alexa scanned the street. “Where’s Sergeant Wallace’s car?”
His eyes were as vacant as the street. In slow motion he reached for a shotgun perched against the siding. Lifted it. Turned.
Alexa slammed the door, lunged for the phone. Bruce was right. Stephen was armed and dangerous.
But wait—Stephen hadn’t been aiming. He’d balanced the shotgun like an offering in his outstretched hands. Had she overreacted?
Wailing seeped through the station walls. Alexa froze, listened, hoped it was a siren and that backup was coming. But no. The wail was human. Stephen was crying. She flicked the porch light on and cracked the door. Stephen sat on the top step, head bowed to his knees, his keening like chalk scraping a blackboard. The shotgun was laid like an abandoned baby on the doormat.
She inspected it: 870 Remington was etched in the steel butt. Below the brand, a tag said Property of DOC.
“Crying won’t help.” She backed up, over to the coffee counter, and grabbed napkins in lieu of gloves, since the crime kit was in Wallace’s SUV. She returned and gingerly lifted the shotgun, its weight awkward. What if she dropped it? “Is this loaded?” she called.
The ranger’s back stiffened. She could see the bumps of his spine against the wet fabric of his T-shirt. Gulps and blubbers continued.
God—he was useless.
She kept the muzzle pointing away from herself or Stephen and carried it into the unisex bathroom. She stared at the lethal weapon, imagining what might have been lined in its site, and tried to remember something about unloading. Didn’t shotguns fold in half? She had no idea. She searched the bathroom and settled on the shelf above a row of hooks. She shoved aside toilet paper and paper towels and put the gun on it. It was the best she could do. The bathroom door could only be locked from the inside, she noted as she left, which was crap luck in case Stephen changed from Wailing Winkie to Trigger Tim.
Before insisting Stephen come inside—she could see him through the open door, slumped on the steps—she walked to Wallace’s desk phone and dialed Bruce’s number.
Voicemail. She fished out her phone and sent Bruce a text: Stephen @ po station. Then she called 1-1-1.
“Are you in danger?” the operator asked after taking her location.
“I don’t think so. No.” Alexa knew the 1-1-1 operator was based at a call center somewhere off-island, probably in Dunedin or Christchurch.
“What is the nature of your emergency?”
“Well, I have a missing person,” she lowered her voice, “a suspect. He turned himself in. At the Stewart Island Police Station.” She wasn’t sure the operator understood.
“Is he hurt?”
“No. The whole department is searching for him, and he’s here,” she reiterated. “Call Sergeant Kipper Wallace or DI Bruce Horne. Let them know.” She hung up before the operator could tell her to stay on the line.
Another crazy mess. Her eyes landed on the electric kettle. She shoved boiling memories aside as she filled it with water and clicked it on. Hot tea to the rescue.
“Come inside,” she called. Stephen rose and followed her, his wet boots squelching.
Hiking boots.
Alexa pointed to a chair and studied Stephen’s shoes, thinking of the evidence cast. Were Stephen’s boots Merrells? He sat like an obedient dog.
She couldn’t see the brand and went back to making tea.
How long would it be until Bruce looked at his phone? Would he get her text? Would the 9-1-1 operator—well, 1-1-1 operator—get through? She poured the steaming water into a Best Dad mug—her back scars tightening—added a tea bag, and, with care, set it in front of the ranger.
The station phone rang. Stephen stiffened as she answered. “Alexa Glock.”
“This is the 1-1-1 Emergency Call Center. I have a report of a missing person…”
Alexa interrupted. “I’m the one who just called you. Get in touch with Sergeant Wallace or Bruce Horne, I mean DI Horne. Get them to the Stewart Island Police Station STAT.” She hung up.
Stephen shivered. Alexa, thinking shock, looked for a blanket or spare coat, no go—and grabbed hers and draped it over his shoulders. “You’re in big trouble stealing the sergeant’s SUV. Why did you do it?”
He shuddered, wilted. Her jacket slid to the floor. Perhaps her technique needed refining. She sat opposite him and tried again. “Um, Stephen, what’s going on? Are you okay?”
A wail escaped from his mouth.
She leaned back—he didn’t appear dangerous. She watched him gasp and sob. Comforting people wasn’t her nature. No one had comforted her when Mom died. Physical needs—check. Emotional needs—empty box.
Where the hell was the team? She nudged the mug closer to Stephen. “Here. Take a sip.”
He hiccupped and then obeyed. His fingers were boyish and pale. Alexa thought of his mum, how she loved her Stevie boy, and grabbed a napkin from the counter so the ranger could wipe his snotty face.
The tea seemed to unclog Stephen’s vocal cords. “Supervisor Lowell called me in because I was closest,” he sputtered. “He said the whales were doomed. We’d be doing them justice. The tide had turned, and they hadn’t refloated.”
Stephen seemed to be flashbacking to the whale beaching, Alexa realized. He ignored the napkin and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“I saw them from the copter. Masses and masses of whales. Thrashing and heaving. When I got out, I could hear the clicks and cries and see them desperately trying to swim. The ones that were still alive, anyway. The whale I was sitting with watched me. Her big tears made tracks through the sand on her face. I tried to wipe the sand away.” He stared into the tea as if the whale’s beseeching eyes looked back. “My dad, when he slaughtered our lambs, he always covered their eyes by folding down their soft ears. It calmed them. But I couldn’t cover the whales’ eyes. And there was blood.” He wiped his hands on his pants. “So much blood.”
“You were helping them,” Alexa said. Her heart thumped as if it would split in two.
Stephen shuddered and reached for the mug, sloshing tea. “Supervisor Lowell could have ordered sedation. He should have, to calm the whales. Pentobarbital works. I’ve researched it. A shot in the tail. But it takes time to work, and there were so many, and I was alone, so what’s the difference? They watch me all night long, the whales. I can’t sleep.”
Alexa strained for sounds of Bruce and the team, but all she could hear was the patter of rain. She took her phone out, checked for a signal, texted Bruce again: Hurry- Stephen at station. Her gaff wound ached, seeped. She could feel her shirt sticking to it and thought of the other time her shirt had adhered to her skin. Melted into it, really. She shuddered, pushing those thoughts under the rug, and changed the subject. “Did you take Robert King’s PLB?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“So that’s a yes? You took it?”
“The day of the flensing.”
“The what?”
“When I was leading the Māoris to the dead whales so they could do their thing, you know, pray for the whales, carve up the bodies. Send them home. Māori believe whales are taonga.”
Alexa knew from the Rotorua case that taonga meant treasure.
“Zeke Harata and the other elders walked all around the dead whales, up and down the beach. They called them upokohue, talked to them, prayed for them. I watched them before I left.” Stephen seemed to inflate. He used the napkin to wipe his face. “Harata said whales used to be land animals, and they lived in wet places, like rivers and marshes. The god Tāne gifted whales to Tangaroa, the ocean god, and that’s why whales came to live in the sea.” He paused, got a faraway look in his moist eyes. “Maybe the whales got mixed up and thought the forest was their home. Maybe that’s why they beached themselves.”
“Maybe.” Back home, whales occasionally stranded along the Carolina beaches. Scientists thought it was because of underwater sonar pulses, but Alexa didn’t think that was the case here. But she was getting off track. “What about the beacon locator?”
“I saw it on the path, just lying there. Harata saw it too. King must have dropped it. I picked it up and meant to turn it in.”
Footsteps stomped on the porch, and the door slammed open.