I’d first met Rick Spinney when I was a rookie warden patrolling the Midcoast. We’d run into each other at boat ramps and search-and-rescue missions. We had take-out lunches occasionally. Even though we worked for different departments with different missions, the Marine Patrol officer had taken me on as a part-time quasi-apprentice. I suspect he appreciated having a young person around, eager to learn and willing to listen to his off-told tales of derring-do.
Back then, Spinney was a rising star with the Marine Patrol, a genuine hero in a service that got little press, although his department didn’t like to put him in front of cameras. Physically, he was a lumpish man, big without being either fat or muscular, who moved with the grace of a golem. He had a square head with thinning ginger hair he would have been better off shaving. But his eyes were small and shrewd.
One night I’d accompanied him to a coastal creek in pursuit of elver poachers. Elvers are the larval stage of the American eel and are prized as a delicacy in Japan, selling for in excess of $2,000 a pound. Maine glass eels are worth more than their weight in gold.
The poachers were crafty and careful. They had managed to steal elvers out of legal seine nets for consecutive years while remaining only a rumor among the local fishermen. But Spinney had perceived a pattern in their seemingly random movements and accurately predicted which brook to stake out. Once we’d collared the criminals, they’d begged to hear how this seemingly oafish officer had seen through their subtle plans.
Rick just laughed in their faces.
He even refused to tell me how he’d done it. But that night on the elver stream taught me a valuable lesson: never reveal your methods to anyone who’s not your superior or a prosecutor who needs to make charges stick. And even then, only tell them the bare minimum.
While Spinney and I hadn’t seen each other in ages, I had heard through the grapevine that he was having problems even before Hillary Fitzgerald mentioned his impending divorce. By all accounts, Rick’s self-confidence had turned to arrogance and his career was now hanging by a thread.
He held his boat in place off the rock while McLeary floated in her raft nearby. “I didn’t expect to see you here, Mike.”
“I didn’t expect to be here.”
The boat he was driving was one of the bureau’s Protectors: a modified twenty-one-foot Boston Whaler with a center console, manned by a single officer. The last time Spinney and I had crossed paths, he’d been captaining the Marine Patrol’s ship of the line, the forty-two-foot P/V Endeavor. It seemed further proof of his downward spiral to see him as a lowly patrol warden.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“It’s bad. We need to get the state police Major Crimes Unit out here.”
He looked past me, up the fog-wooled hillside. “Is Hillary OK?”
Christ.
I was trying to come up with a response that wasn’t a rebuke to his lack of professionalism.
Fortunately, I was saved again by an engine, two of them this time.
We all turned seaward at the sound of the approaching motorboat. Whatever was heading our way was large and powerful.
Seconds later, a Coast Guard response boat came roaring up. It was an intimidating vessel: steel-gray hull with an orange gunwale, gun mounts fore and aft, ballistic plates around the cabin, dual engines capable of outrunning almost any boat common to Maine waters. It had been designed to give off an unmistakable “don’t mess with us” aura.
Spinney held up a hand in greeting as the boat cut its engines. In his job, he must have known every Coastie from Kittery to Eastport.
There were five guardsmen on board—the captain in the cockpit, three young guys dressed in orange life vests over blue operational dress uniforms, and a lone female crew member in the front coxswain seat. All of them wore black gunbelts. At least they hadn’t gotten out the automatic weapons.
The captain was actually a petty officer second class. He emerged from his bulletproof enclosure.
“Everything all right here, Spinney?”
“No, but I have it in hand.”
The petty office reminded me of myself at twenty-four, not just in attitude but in his looks. We might have been blue-eyed cousins. “We got an emergency call about an intruder on the island. I was told to check with Dr. McLeary.” He directed himself now at Maeve. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
“No, I’m not fucking all right. These two jackasses won’t let me land on my own island.”
Spinney had gone from her ally to my accomplice in the blink of an eye.
I held out my badge again, hoping the guardsmen would take it more seriously than McLeary had. “I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service. My name is Mike Bowditch. You can verify my identity with dispatch, but Specialist Spinney will also vouch for me, I hope.”
Spinney nodded his big head. “He’s who he says he is.”
“I arrived at Baker Island just after dawn and found evidence of multiple felonies. I need to contact the Maine State Police. The island is under IF&W jurisdiction. Until the Major Crimes Unit arrives, it’s my show.”
“Are you talking about homicides?” asked my petty officer doppelgänger.
“How many?” said Spinney.
I was unsure how much detailed information to share with the guardsmen, especially within earshot of McLeary. But it didn’t matter.
“Two are dead and one is missing,” muttered McLeary. The shock had finally hit her.
“I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” I said, “but I can’t say more until the state police arrive. And I can’t let anyone ashore—that goes for you, too, Rick.”
“We’ll call dispatch,” said the boat’s commanding officer. He instructed his female crew member to contact the state authorities. His three male guardsmen looked restless. “Is there anything we can do?”
I considered sending them to find Stacey or to begin a search for the missing skiff, but those were not my directives to give. As the first officer at the scene of a homicide, my sole priority was to set up a perimeter.
“Just hang tight until the detectives arrive.”
“It’s all my fault,” said Maeve mysteriously. She seemed to have aged a decade in the minutes since we’d met. For the first time since she’d sped past Stacey and me in the fog, I found myself feeling compassion for her.
“Dr. McLeary, I wonder if I can borrow your satellite phone.”
She shuffled into the cabin, retrieved the thousand-dollar communications device, and threw it at me underhand, the way a softball pitcher might hurl a heater. She had excellent aim and arm strength. I was lucky to make the catch.
I keyed in Stacey’s cell phone number, expecting to get her voice mail.
“Hello?” she said.
“You’re there!”
“Mike? Where are you? Whose phone are you using?”
I turned my back to the cove and lowered my voice. “Maeve McLeary’s. She showed up not long after you left. She was followed by Rick Spinney, the Marine Patrol officer Hillary mentioned. And now the Coast Guard is here, too.”
“Did you find Garrett?”
“Not yet. But I’m pretty sure he took the skiff or tried to.”
“Have you told Maeve about Kendra and Hillary?”
“Yeah, but I omitted the gory details. Where are you, Stace?”
“In Ayers Village. I’m warming up in the house of a very nice couple named Skip and Dorothea Ayers. I got a signal as I entered the passage between Ayers and Hatchet Island. The state police are on the way.”
The thought that I might see them sooner rather than later was a relief.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she continued, “but I called Steve Klesko at home. I know he’s your friend. He’s getting himself assigned to the investigation.”
“Steve’s the best detective in the state since Soctomah got sick.”
“I called my folks, too. They’d never forgive me if I didn’t tell them about Kendra. Don’t worry. I managed to talk my dad out of flying down here. You can imagine how difficult that was.”
“How are you holding up, Stace?”
“I want so much to call Kendra’s folks. They were really close, and it’s going to be like the world ending for them. But I know I can’t be the one to break the news. It has to be the police, right?”
“Steve will want to talk with them if Kendra mentioned anything about the island, anything that scared her. I know it sucks. But I can let you know after he’s contacted them so you can reach out. Please send my condolences. Tell them I personally won’t let this go.”
“That’s one of the reasons I love you,” she said. “Is there any way you can persuade the colonel to make you part of the investigation?”
“I can try. Your voice sounds hoarse.”
“I sobbed pretty hard while I was paddling. Being around strangers is making me hold myself together.” She paused. “I’ve been thinking more about Garrett. As long as he’s missing, the state police are going to treat him as the prime suspect.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “Under the circumstances.”
“Plus, he happens to be Black.”
“Come on, Stacey. You know Steve Klesko isn’t a racist.”
“There are going to be other cops working this case.”
She’d brought Sheriff Santum back into my head. But I realized I was prejudging the man unfairly.
“I think you should stay there for the time being,” I said.
“On Ayers, you mean?”
“You can’t come back here. The island is off-limits to everyone until the detectives and the evidence response people complete their work. Better for you to rest and dry off.”
“But Steve will want to interview me,” she said. “He’ll want to ask me about the conversation Kendra and I had while you were watching puffins in Garrett’s blind.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That Maeve was beginning to scare her. I didn’t think she meant it literally. But now I’m not so certain.”
McLeary wasn’t acting like someone who had just committed two murders. Her shock and grief seemed so raw and genuine. And what possible reason would she have to kill her assistants since it would inevitably mean the end of her life’s work? The Maine Seabird Initiative had already been on life support. Now there would be no saving it.
“I still think you should stay there,” I said. “Steve and his partner will definitely want to interview Bear Goodale and his friend from the Persuader.”
“They’ll also want to talk with Justin Speer.”
“Who?”
“The man we saw on the Spindrift. My hosts tell me that Justin and his wife Brenna are artistes. Skip is a lobsterman and his family has been on the island since before Maine was a state. He and Dorothea don’t have much use for some of the young ‘transplants’ the Markhams brought over to live on Ayers.”
“What did they say specifically about this Speer character?”
“That he is Clay Markham’s photographic assistant and shares his same morbid sensibility. A dead whale washed up here last spring, and Justin spent days photographing the process of decomposition until Skip got so fed up, he towed the rotting carcass out to sea.”
“Skip Ayers sounds like my kind of guy.”
“You’d love him. Dorothea too. They remind me a little of my folks. Maybe it’s because she’s in a wheelchair now, recovering from double ankle surgery. She says she’ll be up and walking in a few days, and I don’t doubt her determination.”
I could sense Stacey’s sadness when she thought of her mother, who would never rise from her chair again. I decided to change the subject.
“What did you learn about Justin’s wife, Brenna Speer?”
“The Speers have a newborn. It sounds like being a new mother is her full-time job. I’ve seen her pass by the house. She looks kind of meek and mousy, but Skip says she and her husband are ‘cut out of the same piece of goods.’”
“I’d appreciate your giving the Speers a wide berth until I arrive.”
“If it were up to me, I’d curl up in a corner here. But I don’t have the luxury of falling to pieces now. Do I?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t like you being there without me.”
“And I don’t like you being on Baker without me. But those are the straws we’ve drawn.”
A series of huge waves came crashing over the heap of granite that served as the cove’s breakwater. The anchored boats began to rock from the unexplained swell. A big ship must have been passing far out to sea.
“This is our second vacation interrupted by a murder,” she said.
“When was the first?”
“Was it five years ago? We’d just arrived at that cottage on Popham Beach when you were called away to look for those women missing on the Appalachian Trail in the Hundred-Mile Wilderness. And then I joined the search. As bad as that ended up being, this feels worse.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t go on vacation.”
I’d meant it as a joke, but neither of us was in a mood to laugh.