A fat, fuzzy bumblebee landed on the tabletop and began to wander around in circles. It seemed very interested in the gull droppings. I planned on letting the insect alone. But Klesko flattened the bee with his fist.
“It wouldn’t have stung us,” I said.
“My dad always said, ‘If you see a bee, kill it.’”
“Why?”
“He just always said it.”
“I take it he wasn’t in the honey business,” I said. “But getting back to Levandowski…”
“His mom said he’d been having a rough time since he returned from Baker last year. He was a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design studying photography. He was failing most of his courses. The school recommended he take a semester off, which he did.” He massaged his forehead, still red from where he’d smacked it. “There’s something else I’m forgetting.”
We both waited for the memory to return, but it didn’t.
“I’ll make a call to Aaron Cyr,” he said. “He handled the suicide investigation for us.”
“You should also talk with McLeary about Evan Levandowski.”
“I am planning on it.”
“I mean there’s something more I haven’t told you. Kendra said Levandowski emailed McLeary the morning he killed himself, but she didn’t know what the message said. Levandowski was supposed to come back to the island as a summer intern. McLeary had to scramble to find a replacement, and that’s how she ended up hiring Garrett Meadows all the way from Scotland.”
“This all feels peripheral.” Klesko tapped his pen against the guano-splattered table. “I feel like we’re wandering off track.”
I couldn’t see a connection between Levandowski’s suicide and the murders, either, unless someone blamed the Maine Seabird Initiative for the young man’s death and wanted revenge. That theory didn’t even deserve to be called far-fetched.
“By the way,” I said. “I stopped to talk with McLeary a few minutes ago. She’s got a bottle of Tanqueray she’s hitting pretty hard. You might want to interview her before she passes out.”
“I guess we should speed this up, then. You said Stacey was worried about Kendra. Did she confide any specific fears or—”
“Not that I know of. But Stacey has this paranormal-level intuition. I told her to wait for you on Ayers, assuming you and Cruz will head over this afternoon.”
“I hope it ends up being this afternoon and not this evening,” he said. “So you and Stacey camped on Spruce, and at 3:42, you heard a gunshot from this direction.”
“Correct.”
“Just a single shot?”
“Correct.”
“And that shot made you decide to paddle back to Baker in the morning—to check it out?”
“Correct again.”
“But you said the researchers were shooting weasels that someone dropped here as a prank.”
“Hardly a prank if it means hundreds of dead birds.”
“Bad choice of words. What was it about the gunshot that made you suspicious enough to paddle back here?”
I’d been asking myself the same question for hours.
“There was so much tension between the researchers. The entire project was at risk of collapsing from lack of funds. I suppose it will collapse. Who’s likely to donate a million dollars to a puffin project whose staff has been massacred?”
“Another reason for McLeary to be drowning herself in gin, not that she’s short of reasons.” Klesko clicked off the recorder. “Let’s hear what she has to say for herself.”
But a revelation had just come over me, and I remained seated while he slid his legs out from the picnic table.
“I can’t believe I forgot this,” I said. “There was someone else with us on Spruce last night, or more precisely, there was a motorboat anchored in the northwestern cove of the island. After we heard the gunshot, we crossed the island and hailed the boat from shore, asking if they could radio Baker for us.”
Klesko crossed his arms. “What did the people on the boat say?”
“That’s just it. They didn’t say anything. They just took off. We heard the winch pulling up the anchor and then the outboard starting, and then they motored off. The fog was thick, and we couldn’t see the boat from the beach, except for a red navigation light on the port bow.”
“So the boat was definitely anchored off Spruce Island when you heard the gunshot?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But we can’t assume the shot I heard was connected with the killings.”
He scratched his dented nose. “Now you sound like me.”
“No need to be insulting, Steve.”
“The boat might or might not be relevant, in other words. And since you didn’t get a good look at it, I doubt we’ll have much luck making an identification. Let’s go talk with Dr. McLeary, assuming she’s still sober enough to string together sentences.”
As I pushed myself to my feet, I felt a twinge in my thigh from the bullet wound I’d sustained six months before. The round had cut a shallow trench through my quadriceps. Most of the time, I forgot about the damage the muscle had sustained, but certain movements—like standing—brought it back.
Klesko reached into his pocket and removed two half-crushed granola bars. “You want one? Our conversation with McLeary might take a while.”
“What I really need is coffee.”
“You and me both, man. I was up half the night with our little guy. My father told me, ‘Have kids while you’re still young and have the energy to chase them around.’ I can personally vouch for the wisdom of those words. How old are you, Mike—thirty-five?”
“Thirty-two.”
“I thought you were older.”
People always did.
As we neared McLeary’s tent platform, we saw Spinney stalking off toward the landing. I called to him. He stopped but didn’t return. Instead, he pointed his finger at a half dozen recreational boats that floated off the island. Murders and fatal fires always brought out curiosity seekers.
“Those fucking vultures!”
“I don’t like it, either,” Klesko called. “But they’re not interfering. You can’t just chase them off public waters.”
“Watch me!”
I realized that McLeary had disappeared from her spot outside the tent. Both her backpack and her green bottle of Tanqueray were gone.
“Wait! Where’s Maeve?”
“She had to take a piss, but because she can’t use the outhouse, she was going in the bushes.” He pointed to the shore path that curled around the base camp to the east. Then he trotted off toward his Boston Whaler.
There were no bushes on this side of the rise, but I remembered a field of bayberry and seaside goldenrod beyond.
“Do we wait?” Klesko asked.
“I think we should go after her.”
“Why? It’s an island.”
“Because she took her backpack and her booze. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to let her out of our sight. I may be wrong, but my gut tells me she’s the key to what happened here, or she can show us where the key is. The island’s flat on the eastern side. We should be able to see her once we’re on top.”
“You’re never going to take my advice about not making assumptions. But all right. I’ll follow your lead.”
When we crested the ridge, I spotted her immediately: a distant figure in blue, thirty yards from Hillary’s observation blind. She was kneeling near a cairn-shaped pile of stones that was part of the island’s natural wall. I had an excellent view of her silver ponytail, but I had no clue what she was doing.
Klesko cupped his hands around his mouth. “Dr. McLeary!”
Maeve barely glanced at us before she returned to whatever task or ritual she was performing.
“I don’t like this.”
I moved ahead of Klesko and began hurrying down the trail.
It would have been faster to make a dash through the bushes, but I worried about tripping on unseen rocks and stepping on nests, not to mention bombs. I remembered there was a sharp drop-off on the eastern side of Baker. I broke into a run. I dodged a tern that swooped down to harass me. I leaped over a granite boulder that would have fit comfortably in the sling of a medieval catapult.
I had closed to within thirty yards when she dropped the last grapefruit-size stone into her backpack. She got her arms under the shoulder straps, but she staggered under the weight. Her backside dislodged the Tanqueray bottle, balanced on a rock, and the glass smashed to the ground.
“Don’t, Maeve!”
She managed to step onto the berm above the ocean.
Maeve McLeary gave me one final scowl and let herself fall backward, pulled by the weight of the stones, like a scuba diver going over a gunwale, into a surging sea.