First, though, Klesko and Cruz had to confer with the medical examiners.
Several of the troopers and techs who had gotten too far from the base camp already had wounds where the birds had pecked them. I took it upon myself to fetch Band-Aids from the first aid kit in my kayak. Kitteridge didn’t have any, despite being a physician; his patients were all dead.
Upon my return, I noticed that Maeve McLeary was sitting with her legs crossed on the ground beside her tent, under the watchful eye of Rick Spinney, of all people. I wondered if Klesko had assigned him to babysit the ornithologist. Spinney kept glancing toward the grass outside the cookhouse, where the rest of the officers were being briefed. He looked like the loneliest man on earth.
“How are you, Rick?” I asked the Marine Patrol Officer.
“How do you think?” he said.
The aggressiveness of the question gave me pause. “I know you were friendly with the researchers.”
“So what? Are you accusing me of something?”
“I just meant that it’s always hard when you know the victims.”
“Right.” He rubbed his doughy face. “You ever play poker and find yourself getting dealt one lousy hand after another? I was supposed to be in court later. But that won’t be happening.”
Hillary had mentioned Spinney getting divorced. I had a hunch, from his bad temper, that his court appointment was not connected to his duties for the Marine Patrol.
“You mind if I talk to Dr. McLeary?”
“Why should I mind? I’m not guarding her, as far as I know. It’s just like the staties to keep us out of the loop, isn’t it?”
Maeve McLeary stared out to sea, but her eyes seemed unfocused. On a rock beside her was a large green bottle of Tanqueray gin. I wasn’t sure if she’d brought it from the Selkie or implored the Marine Patrol officer to fetch it from inside her tent.
She took a pull from the half-gallon of liquor, wiped her mouth, then said to me without looking up, “Do you want a drink?”
“No.”
“It’s the good stuff.”
“The detectives need you to have a clear head when they interview you.”
“Well, they’d better get a wiggle on, because I intend to get pissed, as we used to say at St. Andrews. ‘The Effect of Fish Processing Vessels on Pelagic Bird Populations and Diversity on the Grand Banks’—that was the title of my dissertation. It was a real page-turner, let me tell you.”
“Is that why you hired Garrett?” I asked. “Because he was studying at your alma mater?”
“I hired him because I needed a body. And I thought he’d look good in my fundraising materials. Diversity, et cetera. It’s probably not the first time a cynical marketing ploy blew up in the cynic’s face.”
Her silence when Santum had accused Garrett Meadows of being a killer continued to rankle me, even more since we’d discovered the black nylon swatch. And yet she undeniably knew more about her own intern than I did. Was my positive but brief interaction with the man clouding my vision?
“Where were you, Dr. McLeary? You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Here and there. Asking people for money.”
“They were worried about you. Not knowing where you were or when to expect you.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” The anger passed as quickly as it arrived. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
“You told your staff you were headed back to the island yesterday afternoon.”
“You’re Stacey’s friend Mike,” she said, looking at me for the first time with that intense, heron-like stare.
“I am.”
“I heard from Rick Spinney that you and she were here yesterday. I’m sorry it took me all this time to make the connection. Where is she?”
“When we found the bodies, she paddled to Ayers to call for help.”
“Of course she did,” she said, smiling sadly. “That’s my girl. Please tell her I’m sorry that I wasn’t here yesterday. It would have been better if I’d stayed on the island—better for everyone.”
I had no idea how to respond, but in these situations, I had found it was best to let a person keep talking.
“She must be devastated by what happened to Kendra,” she said. “Those two were always so tight. I used to call Stacey the ‘devil on Kendra’s shoulder,’ because she was always getting poor Ballard into trouble.”
“She’s grown up a lot since then.”
Her gaze wandered out to sea again, and I realized she was watching the puffins and other seabirds in the water, but the sight no longer seemed to bring her joy. “I’m the last one to judge. I’ve always been hard on people, my interns especially. A hanging judge, that’s what I’ve been. But now I’ve built my own gallows.”
“How so?”
She raised her head, blinking as if to shake off a daydream, and I cursed myself for having interrupted what had been a confession. She smiled sadly again and shook her head and then took another swig from the gin bottle, signaling we were done. With luck, Klesko would let me sit in while he questioned her about her whereabouts and the multiple threats to the research station.
I turned to leave, but she had one last thing for me.
“Warden?”
“Yes?”
“Be good to her.”
When I reached the top of the hill, Klesko buttonholed me. He was ready to take my statement. He suggested we sit at the same picnic table where I’d eaten lobster rolls the afternoon before.
Spruce Island was shining green in the sun. It seemed to have floated a mile closer in the light of day.
As we were taking our seats on the weathered planks, I said, “I expected you to bring along an assistant attorney general.”
“She got held up in traffic, and the Endeavor needed to get going. She’ll be here this afternoon, though. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is also sending an agent and a biologist since roseate terns are federally protected. I guess they don’t trust you to watch out for them.”
They were right not to trust me, sad to say. I’d been so preoccupied with the murders I hadn’t checked that the evidence technicians—not to mention Sheriff Santum and his deputies—weren’t stepping on eggs.
“Won’t Cruz be sitting in on this?” I asked.
“She has enough to do,” he said. “And she trusts me to cover all the bases.”
“She doesn’t strike me as the trusting type.”
Klesko had a dent in his nose from another hockey injury and tended to touch it when something amused him. “I can’t blame her, considering the situation she walked into. We’ve been partners for four months, and she’s only recently started speaking candidly around me. She had to see me in action to be sure I wasn’t some Barney Fife.”
“She certainly doesn’t trust me,” I said. “Being a mere game warden.”
“That’s not true. Cruz was impressed with how well you preserved the crime scene for us. And she was particularly won over by the connection you made between the nylon stocking and Garrett Meadows’s spontaneous utterance about the faceless man.”
“She seems smart.”
“‘Scary smart’ is how my wife describes her.” He removed a digital recorder from his windbreaker and placed it between us. “Let’s get started. You know the drill.”
He took notes in his pad and rarely interrupted me as I moved chronologically through the events of the previous days, starting with the message Stacey had gotten from Kendra, to our setting off from East Boothbay in our kayaks, to our landing on Baker Island and our interactions with the researchers, to the sighting of the unknown photographer aboard the Spindrift: the man Stacey had identified as Justin Speer of Ayers Island.
“I’m going to stop you there.” Klesko had been a defenseman on the University of Maine hockey team. Even then, he’d been an enforcer. “As far as you know, has she spoken with this Speer yet?”
“Stacey knows better than that.”
His expression was doubtful. So many people still thought of her as the reckless, insubordinate person she’d been when she worked as a state wildlife biologist. She had a lot of work to do, proving she had changed. I knew what that was like.
“Go on,” he said.
I told him about my encounter with Bear Goodale and Chris Beckwith of the Persuader and how Garrett had reacted. I mentioned how I’d tried and failed to find a cell signal, adding that the researchers had one place where they got spotty coverage. (Reading Steve’s writing upside down, I saw him underline the words: where are their phones?) I realized I had forgotten to bring up the short-tailed weasels and Kendra’s assertion that someone with a grudge had released them to devastate the bird population, so I backtracked to include that information in the record.
“Wouldn’t that argue for the secret landing place you mentioned?” he said.
“Not necessarily. The weasels could have been set loose over the winter. The Maine Seabird Initiative is only active from May through August. After that, a boat could anchor in the cove and send a dinghy over to Plymouth Rock.”
“So you don’t think there’s another way onto the island?”
“Stacey looked for it when she was an intern—her thought was that it would be down near the abandoned lifesaving station, where there had once been a pier. But she came up empty. I’d love to have a look myself.”
“Maybe when you and I are done here,” suggested Klesko with a sly smile. “While you’re reminding my people not to step on nests.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Sorry. Please continue.”
Next I recounted my conversation with Hillary while we’d washed dishes. I told him how she’d received a call on the radio from Maeve after I’d left. Then, as I was about to discuss our last conversation with Kendra before we departed the island, he looked up from his notepad.
“I’m going to stop you there,” he said. “This is great, Mike, very detailed and comprehensive. But was there anything odd you noticed? Maybe it didn’t seem consequential at the time, but it left you feeling unsettled?”
I began stroking my chin. It was a habit I had picked up from Charley Stevens when the old pilot became pensive. I’d probably picked up a dozen habits from my mentor that I hadn’t recognized.
“There’s a photo in the cookhouse,” I said at last. “There are a bunch of photos on the walls, almost all of them with McLeary front and center, but this one is unusual.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s of this young intern alone. And it’s tacked up in a place of prominence. I remember thinking when I saw it, This guy is dead. It turns out I was right.”
“Did you get his name?”
“Evan Levandowski. Kendra called him, ‘Our dear Evan.’”
To my surprise, Klesko squeezed his eyes shut and hit his forehead with the heel of his hand.
“Dumb,” he said. “Dumb, dumb, dumb.”
“What?”
“When I got Stacey’s call this morning about the homicides, I felt like I’d heard something about Baker Island not too long ago. It had come up in the news. I felt like I’d read it in the papers while I was on leave and then forgot about it because, you know, I’ve had a thousand other things to focus on.”
“If it’s any consolation, I didn’t make the connection.”
“You have an excuse at least,” said Klesko. “I heard the whole story from a trooper who was at the scene. This guy got out of his Subaru halfway across the Penobscot Narrows Bridge. Vehicles stopped in both directions. A truck driver tried to grab him, but the guy was too fast. He didn’t even hesitate, the trucker said.”
“I’ve never understood why there isn’t a suicide barrier along the bridge.”
“Did you know it’s one hundred and thirty-five feet from the road to the Penobscot River? Think how much time he had as he fell. You always figure people must have second thoughts. But all the witnesses said he was determined, and he couldn’t have chosen a brutaler way to do it. The state police divers who fished his body out of the water, past Verona Island, where the currents had carried it, said it was like picking up a human rag doll. His body had turned to mush on impact.”