In the course of his law enforcement life, Howie had never felt so disturbed.
He had worked crime scenes with Meredith Folger before—murder scenes, even. He did not faint at the sight of blood, and the idea of a corpse did not make him squeamish. But as he examined the dead woman lying on the Cottage Hospital gurney, he felt a surge of unexpected emotion. He was staring at someone his age. Nameless, in her final solitude. Exposed to strangers. And yet, she had a life—somewhere, unknown to Howie, were people who mattered to her. They were going about their simple routines. Finishing dinner. Laughing over a moment from the day, perhaps. Without knowing that the woman they loved was dead.
He understood, suddenly, why Merry got so angry when she investigated murder. She hated the violation and theft—of this woman’s simple days, her happiness and relationships, her individual space in the world. And of course, her possible future. Holding a killer responsible was Merry’s attempt to apologize for all that destruction. A private crusade, masked by her very public job.
Howie had never really thought of his work in that way. He liked the complexity of investigations; even mundane ones involving drug busts or stolen property or hit-and-runs by drunk drivers. He was good at putting together puzzles. And he loved being able to do his job on Nantucket—a rare community that was at once intimate and world-class. This was the first time he’d felt shaken and moved by what lay before him. Maybe he was growing up.
Or maybe it’s because she’s roughly Di’s age, too, he thought.
He drew a sheet over the woman’s head.
Howie was done with his examination. He’d noted the lack of defensive wounds on her arms or hands, the lack of powder burns on her skin—her killer had never been close enough to fight off. He’d taken pictures of her savaged abdomen. He had noticed bruises in the shape of thumbprints on her neck, and photographed these. He suspected, from their yellowish hue, that the bruises were several days old; whether hands had choked her in passion or anger, this was not what had killed her.
He closed his laptop. The finger and palm prints he’d collected were already sealed in evidence bags; so were the bullet fragments a physician’s assistant had pulled from the body. There were at least a dozen of these; the round shot into the victim’s abdomen had fragmented in its path through her small intestine, liver, rib cage, and thorax. To Howie, the sheer number of fragments suggested a hollow-tipped full metal jacket. But how many grains the round had held, or whether it was 9 mm or .38, he could not have said. The Crime Bureau forensic lab on the mainland would tell them more.
He paused as he pulled the door of the morgue closed behind him, and stood uncertainly in the corridor. Nantucket Cottage Hospital’s new hundred-thousand-square-foot complex was barely a year old, and Howie was unfamiliar with the layout. Signs overhead and a map on the wall directed him eventually back to the ER.
“I’d like to see the gunshot wound patient brought in by the Coast Guard this evening,” he told the duty nurse. Her name tag read Rebecca.
She glanced up from her computer. “He’s been moved to a private room. I can look that up for you.”
“Great. But could I talk to the doc who worked on him, first?”
“That would be Dr. Hughes,” she said. But she looked dubious. “Patient confidentiality may preclude her telling you much.”
Dr. Hughes was a competent woman roughly a decade older than Howie, who’d helped the police department with crime scene investigations before. The previous summer, on call while the medical examiner was off-island, she had responded to a murder.
“The guy was shot,” Howie said evenly. “Could have been an accident, could have been intentional. Either way, police are involved. Right now, I just want to know if he’s going to live.”
The nurse sighed. “Follow me. We have a family conference room for this sort of thing.”
“I wish like hell we could have gotten that patient medevacked to Boston,” Summer Hughes told Howie, “but I just thought it was too dangerous to risk sending a Flight for Life crew out with a hurricane coming. Now, it’ll be at least thirty-six hours before we can transport him.”
There were no windows in the conference room, no way to assess the state of the storm right now, but Howie thought of Meredith and the Coast Guard helicopter. Summer’s caution about summoning a medevac chopper underlined the risks Clarence and Merry were running. The Coast Guard Jayhawk should have been grounded, too. He suspected Meredith hadn’t cleared her evidence collection adventure with Bob Pocock. Clarence certainly hadn’t; he avoided dealing with the chief whenever possible.
“Is this guy likely to survive thirty-six hours?” he asked Summer.
She blew out a deep breath. “If he does, he’ll probably recover entirely. It’s the first two days that are critical, with a gunshot wound to the head.”
“You know there was a second victim, who died.”
Summer nodded.
“I studied the wound to her abdomen—with the help of one of your PAs,” Howie said. “The bullet ricocheted through her vital organs. Came out in fragments. That suggests a particular type of round—”
“One that does maximum damage,” Summer supplied.
“Yes. Which leads me to ask you: how’d this guy survive a headshot?”
The doctor lifted her brows. “Some do. Maybe five percent of all victims. It depends on the bullet’s trajectory. I triaged this patient in the ER before Dr. Mendelsohn rushed him into surgery to remove bone fragments and a piece of his skull. There is a trench several millimeters deep furrowed through his cranium about an inch above his ear. He lost some bone and dura mater—that’s the outermost layer of the meninges, the membrane that encases the brain—but the shot didn’t penetrate to the brain itself.”
“So, he was lucky.”
She shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you that the worst part of any bullet wound is the shock wave that follows a projectile’s path.”
Howie nodded. It was part of his training to know how to fire a gun—and exactly how a bullet destroyed people. Which was called wound ballistics. As it penetrates the body, even a low-velocity round causes a temporary pressure wave that moves outward perpendicularly to the bullet’s path. The wave shoves tissue aside—creating a brief cavity, thirty times larger than the projectile itself. Trauma from the cavity’s creation and collapse causes hemorrhages. In the brain, that kind of shock wave has nowhere to go—because the brain is contained and bounded by its skull. Traumatized brain tissue immediately begins to swell.
“If the procedure Mendelsohn performed on the victim’s cranium works correctly, his brain trauma and swelling should gradually subside over the next few days,” Summer concluded. “If that’s happening, we should see some evidence of it in the next few hours.”
“Did you or your colleague find any bullet fragments mixed in with the bone?”
“No.”
“Then I’m confused.” Howie rubbed fretfully at his brow. “The female victim was littered with shrapnel. That suggests a hollow-tipped, full-metal-jacket handgun round. If a round like that hits bone—like someone’s skull—it should also fragment. This bullet didn’t.”
“Is that important?” Summer asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Howie replied. “It means we’re dealing with two different types of rounds. Fired from two different guns.”
“So, there were two shooters?” Summer asked. “I suppose that’s not really surprising. The victims must have shot each other.”
If only it were that simple, Howie thought. “I think it’s surprising as hell. Since when do pleasure-boaters pack personal weapons on vacation?”
“I found some vodka,” she told the stranger sitting on the barn floor. “I’m Dionis, by the way.”
“Dionis?” he repeated. “As in, the Greek god of wine?”
“No,” she replied, disconcerted. “As in, the beach near Madaket. You know . . . Eel Point?”
“I don’t, actually.”
She handed him the vodka. “So, you’re not from Nantucket.”
“I am not.”
He had wrapped a towel around his waist while she rummaged in the studio’s galley kitchen, and the comforter was draped over his shoulders. He uncapped the alcohol and took a swig, sighing deeply. His eyelids, thickly lashed, creased closed in relief.
“I thought maybe you’d come out of the harbor . . . or were trying to get back . . . when you grounded your boat.”
“Are there any paper towels in the kitchen?” His voice, she realized, was weakening. “Any first aid supplies?”
“I’ll check.”
As Dionis turned back through the doorway, the tea kettle whistle blew. She lifted it off the burner hurriedly and set it to one side. Grabbed a roll of paper towel from the kitchen counter. First aid stuff was probably in Mandy’s bathroom. She ducked into it, her gaze drifting to the window.
Shit. It was dark out. Agitation whirled upward through her chest. She couldn’t leave Tuckernuck now. And her dad—
Her dad could be dead.
Hurriedly, Dionis pulled open the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink. Three rolls of toilet paper. A plunger. A bottle of toilet bowl cleaner. And at the back, wedged behind the pipes—a small plastic first aid kit with a red cross symbol stamped on it.
She dashed back, prying open the kit as she went. “I don’t think it’s ever been used.”
She handed him the roll of paper towel and stopped short. He had removed the filthy fabric wrapped around his right hand. The wound he exposed was a black-edged hole in the center of his palm. As though someone had set the muzzle of a gun against it and fired.
Which was exactly, Dionis realized, what someone had done.
“What happened?” she croaked, the words fighting their way from her constricted throat.
“I told you. An accident. I grabbed my handgun as I was leaving the yacht. It went off by mistake.”
Why do you have a gun? she nearly asked; but the words died on her lips. Some people liked guns. Felt safer carrying them. She knelt beside him. “How can I help?”
“I need to disinfect this.” The blue eyes met hers. “But I need to clean and irrigate it first.”
“That’s going to hurt like hell.”
His lips flickered grimly. “Already does. That water you boiled. Is it still hot?”
“Won’t that just burn your hand?”
“Let it sit for a few minutes. It’s safe at a hundred twenty degrees.”
“How am I supposed to know?” Apprehension rose in her throat; how was she supposed to know anything about this complete stranger who’d appeared out of nowhere with a vicious wound from a gun?
“Use some of the water to make tea. When it has cooled off enough to drink, we can pour it over my hand.”
“Are you a doctor?” Dionis asked. It would make sense; she knew doctors, Summer People, who owned yachts. And he’d used that word—yacht.
“More of an Eagle Scout,” he said.
For some reason, the phrase reassured her. Dionis went back to the kitchen for the kettle. Rummaged in Mandy’s cupboard until she found some teabags. Poured a cup from the kettle, which was no longer steaming, she noticed. She removed the kettle lid to speed the cooling process and found a mixing bowl stored with Mandy’s pots. She took a sip of tea. Still too hot. She thought for a moment, then went for a clean washcloth. She’d glimpsed a pile of them in the bathroom, as though Mandy never used one twice.
High maintenance.
The tea was cool enough, now; she would assume the water in the kettle was, too. Dionis gathered her supplies, then halted in the doorway, feeling like an executioner.
“Let me pour the water, okay?”
He nodded.
“Do you want something to hold, or bite down on, or . . . ?”
“Just do it.”
Dionis set the bowl beside him, grasped the wrist of his wounded hand, and held it over her makeshift catch-basin. “One. Two. Three—”
He let out a deep gasp, then a string of expletives as the hot water cascaded over and through the bullet wound in his hand.
Dionis counted. Deliberately.
From one to thirty.
The water in the basin turned smoky orange, then red, then a deep maroon.
The wrist she grasped, as firmly as she knew how, shook uncontrollably in her fingers. But he did not fight her.
The water was gone.
She scrabbled in the first-aid kit for a bottle of iodine. And with a deep breath, began to trickle it into the wound.
As he pulled on his uniform jacket, Howie stopped to thank the ER intake nurse before leaving Cottage Hospital. But Rebecca was no longer behind her desk.
“ . . . can’t think where the woman has got to,” Howie heard her say behind an office partition.
“Hello?” he called. “Is anyone available?”
Rebecca, her expression exasperated, emerged. “Officer. Is there something I can do for you?”
“Yes, actually. If someone could contact either me or Detective Meredith Folger regarding the male victim’s medical status, if or when it changes, we’d be grateful. I know that when a new shift comes on, that request could get lost—so if you could put it in both his digital and paper file, I’d appreciate it.”
“Of course,” the nurse said. “I’ll make a note of it. With the day we’re having, I’d forget my own name if I didn’t write it down.”
Howie glanced through the ER windows at the torrential rain, falling in slanted sheets, pounding the parking lot. “Is your relief shift bailing because of the hurricane?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Rebecca’s lips compressed. “It’s only going to get worse. We have two people on life-support systems right now, and if the power goes out, we’ll be spread thin. We have generators, of course, but . . . our ORs have been full all day. The old hospital had one operating room. If an emergency C-section shows up, like it did this afternoon, we bump everyone else out of the surgery line who wasn’t critical. That wouldn’t have worked a few hours ago. We had the gunshot wound, a C-section, and a heart attack with coronary stent today. All within hours of each other.”
She stopped, exhausted.
“Wow,” Howie murmured, impressed. “I hope you get to go home soon. You’ve earned a night off.”
“That reminds me—another note I’ve got to write down.” Her blonde brows drew together, frowning. “This woman hasn’t come back. I told her to go get some dinner while her dad was in the OR, but she’s never returned.”
“Want me to put out an APB?” Howie joked.
Rebecca’s expression was troubled. “I might. It’s weird—she was a wreck when her dad was brought in. Terrified he was going to die. He had a heart attack out at Jackson Point, right on the boat landing. And then—poof. He goes into surgery, she disappears! Nearly four hours later, and there’s no sign of her.”
Jackson Point. The boat landing. Father and daughter.
Howie stared at the nurse, his chest tightening. “You don’t mean Jack Mather? Jack had a heart attack?”
“You know him?”
“It’s a small island. I’m a cop.”
The nurse folded her arms over her chest. “I mean—patient confidentiality . . . I shouldn’t have . . .”
“You’re telling me Dionis Mather hasn’t come back to check on her father?”
“I called her cell when her dad reached recovery,” Rebecca said. “She never picked up.”
Howie felt a chill settle over his heart. “Thanks for letting me know.”