Delphine Cruz ran her tongue over her chapped lips and began ransacking the pockets of her safari jacket for some unknown object.
“You say you only met Meadows yesterday. What was your impression of him?”
“Do you mean, would I consider him a suspect? No way.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I paused to get my words right.
“My impression of Garrett Meadows is that he’s a highly intelligent, affable young man who feels isolated here for a variety of reasons, chief of which would be his race.”
“Meadows is Black?” asked Klesko.
Cruz raised a fashionably thick eyebrow. “And all his coworkers are, or were, white.”
“Kendra and Hillary didn’t seem to have a problem. And Maeve was the one who hired him. She should be able to fill you in on the group dynamics. That said, I personally observed Meadows being harassed by a couple of lobstermen from Ayers Island.”
Cruz turned to her partner. “That’s the big one we passed with all the trees?”
Klesko’s sly grin revealed the gray tooth that was a souvenir of his days playing college hockey. “I guess you could describe Ayers that way. Tell us about these lobstermen, Mike.”
“Their names are Bear—like the animal—Goodale and Chris Beckwith. Meadows suggested they come over regularly to harass him. I got to see one of their performances while I was inside Meadows’s observation blind. They blasted hip-hop and performed mocking dance moves. Their boat, the Persuader, was flying a Confederate flag.”
“Did you interact personally with these brave sons of the South?” Cruz had finally located the tube of lip balm in her pocket.
“Damn right, I did. I identified myself as a law enforcement officer and told them to take down the flag.”
Klesko made a sour face. “Legally, that might be problematic, Mike.”
“Fuck it,” I said. “It was obvious they were bullying Meadows. I don’t care if the DA disagrees that it constituted criminal threatening. The sternman, Beckwith, gave me lip, but the captain, Goodale, came to his senses. They took down the flag, apologized, and left, but I thought Garrett seemed shaken, although he passed it off as no big deal.”
“What did he say specifically?” Klesko asked.
“He didn’t want to talk about it.”
Cruz nodded as if Garrett’s response confirmed my impression of his state of mind.
Behind the two detectives, I spotted Maine’s longtime medical examiner Walter Kitteridge disembarking. He’d brought along one of his young female assistants. (Walt always seemed to have female assistants.) The ME was under fire for having given testimony a judge deemed not credible. Both death examiners wore windbreakers identifying their department but were dressed in civvies beneath the jackets.
I noticed that Spinney had been standing nearby, eavesdropping on my conversation with Klesko and Cruz.
As more investigators came ashore, spooked terns and laughing gulls took to the air. The birds were too intimidated by the crowd to dive on any of the newcomers, but that didn’t stop them from giving voice to their grievances.
Now that the senior personnel had disembarked, leaving only the forensic specialists, Sheriff Santum had edged up the grassy bank with his two deputies. He kept one hand on the grip of his service weapon. I sensed—or probably just imagined—that he was eager to see the dead women.
Klesko told the captain of the Coast Guard boat that he and his crew of guardsmen were no longer needed. The P/V Endeavor would remain behind to transport members of the investigative team to the mainland, if needed.
He next addressed himself to the Selkie. “Dr. McLeary, I am sorry that we couldn’t let you onto the island sooner. I realize it must have been difficult for you to wait.”
“Difficult?” said McLeary. “More like fucking agonizing. I care more about this island than any human alive. I consider it my home.”
“We’re depending on your knowledge to guide us,” said Klesko diplomatically.
“You should know I won’t permit anyone to disturb my birds.”
“That’s going to be unavoidable,” said Cruz. “Unfortunate, but unavoidable.”
“I won’t let you do it!”
Her hearing aids screeched from the feedback.
“Dr. McLeary,” I said, “the Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife has charged me with protecting the birds while the investigation is ongoing. I’d suggest you brief the officers on the critical nesting areas as well as the parts of the island that might hide unexploded ordnance.”
A ripple went through the crowd. Not everyone had heard about the bombs.
“I know for a fact the munitions were cleaned out years ago,” pronounced Sheriff Santum as if he’d received a personal briefing on the subject from the Joint Chiefs. “The sign warning about unexploded ordnance is a phony prop to keep people from accessing public land. Baker should be open to taxpayers—after the birds migrate in the fall, of course.”
“If you’re so confident about the bombs, feel free to wander wherever you like, Sheriff.” McLeary showed a ghoulish smile. “You have my permission.”
“I don’t need your permission.”
“All right!” said Klesko, shouting more from frustration than to be heard above the relentless birds. “Warden Bowditch, I assume you were careful not to disturb anything that might have evidentiary value as you were making your initial search.”
“I can point out the things Stacey and I touched. We avoided the trails between the structures. Instead, I blazed new paths through the bushes.”
“You’d better not have stepped on my nests,” said Maeve McLeary.
Klesko saved me from my big mouth.
“Dr. McLeary, as my partner said before, there’s simply no way around the reality of the situation here. Our homicide investigation takes priority over everything else. Kendra Ballard and Hillary Fitzgerald are depending on us. We must do everything in our power to determine how they died and who killed them.”
“Isn’t it obvious it was Meadows?” Sheriff Santum said. “The man fled the scene, suggesting a guilty mind. Maybe listening to all these birds caused him to snap.”
“That’s nonsense,” I said, looking to McCleary for support, but she was examining her boots.
It shocked me that she didn’t rise to her intern’s defense.
“On the contrary, Warden, it’s the most straightforward explanation,” said the sheriff. “I can assign one of my deputies to meet that lobsterboat when it docks in Damariscotta.”
Klesko stared down Santum. “I’ve already arranged for troopers to accompany the ambulance to the hospital.”
“So you agree he’s the prime suspect?” the sheriff said.
“I haven’t reached any conclusions.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t conduct homicide investigations by throwing around unsubstantiated hypotheses,” said Klesko, who rarely let his frustration come through in his tone. “I prefer to follow established protocols.”
“What protocols would those be?” asked Santum.
“For one, I believe it’s a good idea to start with actual evidence.”
The sheriff snorted.
I have always found it a pleasure to watch someone work who’s good at their job.
Steven Klesko was an extremely good detective.
He had me retrace my steps around the camp while a technician planted flags to mark my routes. He assigned Cruz to work with a contractor from a wireless network to install the cell signal booster the state police brought to remote crime scenes in Maine. He oversaw the Evidence Response Team as they unpacked their gear. He consulted with the death scene examiners. He kept Sheriff Santum and his deputies from wandering off. When Maeve McLeary announced she was returning to her tent, “to see what was disturbed,” Klesko stopped her in her tracks, saying she would need to wait until he had an officer photograph the scene first.
McLeary carried herself with such toughness. I found it odd that she didn’t want to see Kendra and Hillary now.
Maybe she can’t bring herself to face the reality that her protégées are dead? Maybe she’s not as hard-bitten as she pretends to be?
Biologists, in general, are rarely squeamish. And McLeary especially seemed too hard-boiled for that excuse.
With everything ready, I led the detectives, the sheriff, the death scene examiners, and an evidence tech up the hummock behind the cookhouse to Kendra’s body. I felt a lump form in my throat as I caught sight of her waxen face. A kelp fly had alighted on her blue lips, as if it had designs on slipping inside her mouth, but it buzzed off when the shadow of the medical examiner fell across the corpse.
“I can’t say that the blow to the head was the cause of death, but it would have been more than sufficient.” Dr. Walt Kitteridge used a laser pointer to give us an anatomy lesson. “See how the temporal bone has been shattered with fragments driven into the brain? Minimal bleeding, under the circumstances, which suggests sudden death.”
“So he beat her to death with the shotgun?” asked Sheriff Santum.
He can’t let it go, I thought. He’s made up his mind it was Meadows.
The man was so easy to despise. Unfortunately for my self-righteousness, I had remembered something about Santum from his campaign. His Korean-born wife had died young of breast cancer, leaving him with three children. Since he’d retired from the navy, Santum had been active in raising money for cancer research while he parented his school-age children as a single dad.
Hating is so much easier when we can pretend our enemy doesn’t have redeeming qualities.
“It was definitely a blunt instrument,” said the ME. “Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. We’ll have to match the butt of the gun to the wounds. One thing I can say for certain is that the lacerations and contusions on both of her arms were sustained premortem.”
Cruz glanced up from her notebook. “Defensive wounds?”
“Presumably.” Kitteridge took hold of Kendra’s wrist with a gloved hand. “Rigor isn’t fully involved. I’d estimate it’s seven or eight hours along. How cold was it out here last night?”
I assumed the question had been intended for me. “There was rain, then fog. I’d guess the temperature dipped below sixty but not by much. The heaviest rain fell before midnight, which is why we’re finding blood.”
“In that case, time of death becomes harder to fix. Cold impedes the onset of rigor. I’ll be able to pin down the TOD when I get her on the table.”
I had watched several autopsies with dispassion, but my mouth went dry at the thought of Kendra’s liver being lifted from her abdominal cavity and set on a bloody scale.
“Stacey and I heard the shotgun blast at 3:42.”
Kitteridge peeked at his silver-and-gold Rolex. “That falls within the time frame. I need to see what’s in her stomach. As I said, I’ll be able to pin it down after I perform the autopsy.”
“Why would he leave her posed like that?” asked Klesko. “As if she were holding the shotgun?”
I hadn’t yet given the detectives my full statement, which meant they didn’t know about the photographer who’d been stalking the researchers from the Spindrift.
“Signs of a struggle over here!”
Cruz had drifted away from the corpse and was pointing at a crushed swath of grass. Nothing about it immediately said struggle to me. I didn’t spot the intruder’s telltale boot prints. But then Cruz knelt and pointed with her ballpoint pen to what was unmistakably a blood spatter on a bayberry bush. And as she did so, the scene disclosed its secrets to my eyes. Suddenly, the edge of a boot print appeared in the mud beneath the lowest leaves. A shadow amid other shadows became a scrap of black nylon.
“From a woman’s stocking?” Cruz waited for the photographer to get shots of the fabric, then lifted the cloth out with tweezers to drop it in an envelope provided by an attentive evidence tech. “I’m guessing these ladies didn’t dress up a lot out here.”
“Faceless,” I said. “The intruder was wearing this over his head. Kendra tore it off him as she was fighting for her life.”
“It’s a possibility,” said Cruz.
I had repressed Sheriff Santum’s presence until he spoke. “Could be that the Meadows boy planned it, though. He had a story ready to go of an intruder wearing a stocking over his head. It doesn’t necessarily exonerate him.”
“That is correct,” said Cruz. “It doesn’t exonerate him.”
Her agreement startled me until I realized she was merely following Klesko’s example and not allowing herself to get ahead of the evidence.
I found that mindset harder to adopt.
To believe that the friendly, soft-spoken academic was a murderer meant accepting all kinds of far-fetched ideas. That he had obtained a pair of commercial fishing boots to disguise his prints. That he had hit himself in the head to appear to be a victim. That he had launched himself out to sea in an oarless boat, knowing he might capsize, contract hypothermia, or bleed out before he was found.
Never mind that there was no hint of a motive.
The suggestion was worse than ridiculous. It was offensive in its absurdity.
Klesko remained bent over the ground around Kendra’s body. “I can’t find any drag marks.”
“Meaning she was likely killed there,” said Cruz.
“He might’ve carried her to that spot from somewhere else,” said Santum, refusing to relent.
Klesko straightened up. “Mike, how big a man is Garrett Meadows?”
“Five seven, one hundred and fifty pounds.”
“About what Kendra Ballard weighs.”
“He could’ve had an accomplice,” said Santum, resting his hand on his gun again. “You all are assuming there was one killer, but Meadows might’ve had help.”
“With respect, Sheriff,” Cruz said, “the only one making assumptions here is you.”
“Let’s take a look at the other girl,” said Santum.
Once again, I played the role of pathfinder, leading the investigative team to the outhouse where I’d found Hillary Fitzgerald’s body. The sight of Hillary’s underwear in the bushes brought the parade to a halt. I indicated where I had touched the wet, wooden door.
Cruz managed to swing it open without potentially smearing the killer’s fingerprints. Not that the evidence technicians were likely to recover any trace.
“Same blunt force trauma to the temporal bone,” said Kitteridge as sunlight fell upon the wan face of Hillary Fitzgerald. “Brain matter visible.”
“Her tent and sleeping bag are covered in blood,” I said. “And you saw the drag marks outside.”
“That means she was asleep when he bludgeoned her with that rock,” said the sheriff.
“Makes sense,” said the ME. “She doesn’t show the same lacerations and contusions as the other victim.”
Cruz reached for the lip balm again. “We’re going to need you to check for signs of sexual assault, Doc.”
I hadn’t wanted to entertain the thought that one or both had been raped.
“Both victims appear to have been posed postmortem,” said Klesko. “Notable that the eyes of both are open.”
The time had come to pull Steve Klesko aside and tell him everything I’d witnessed in the hours leading up to the slaughter.