When I reached base camp, I found Delphine Cruz sitting cross-legged in McLeary’s tent, going through the contents of the waterproof totes and dry bags in which the ornithologist had stored her clothing and other personal items. It’s a truism in law enforcement that the dead are allowed no secrets.
“Congratulations,” she said. “I heard you located the spot where our killer came ashore.”
My back was slick with sweat from the hike down the island. “The missing cell phones, too.”
“Keep this up, and I’m going to start worrying about my job security.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “How’s it going here?”
“I found these.” She showed me a collection of white bottles containing what looked like vitamins or supplements. Some bore an EarthMother label. I knew the founder of that company all too well. “MacuHealth. Lutein. Zeaxanthin. Omega-3 fish oil.”
“She was worried about her eyes?”
“Good for you. Myself, I had to google what they did. These pills are more than just stuff you take to preserve your vision as you age. They’re what ophthalmologists prescribe to ward off macular degeneration. The science on their effectiveness is shaky, and there’s no proven treatment to stop the condition from worsening.”
“So on top of everything else, Maeve McLeary was afraid of going blind, too? That’s got to be especially brutal for someone who’s spent their whole life watching birds.”
“Sheriff Santum wasn’t far off about her having a health condition on top of every other reason she had to off herself.”
“He’s gone, I hope.”
She smiled without parting her lips. “You sound disappointed. He seems to be one of your most devoted fanboys. I didn’t realize you were such a rock star.”
“That prick doesn’t know the first thing about me.”
She nodded. I hoped the gesture was meant to signal her belief in what I said. “You missed his joke of the day. He had a bunch of the guys in stitches. ‘Do you remember Wake Island in the Pacific?’ he said. ‘Well, we’re going to have to start calling this place Woke Island.’”
“Classy,” I said. “Did you find McLeary’s phone?”
I had remembered the alleged email she’d gotten from Evan Levandowski the morning of his suicide.
“I think the good doctor took it with her down to Davy Jones’s Locker.”
“Where’s Klesko?”
“He just finished calling the next of kin. I offered to do some, but he said it was only right that he be the one. That man carries too much weight. It’s going to crush him someday. He left to go search the Selkie. That was the last I heard from him. Did you get lunch?”
“I had a granola bar.”
“Damn, boy, you need to eat. You and Steve both think denying yourself will bring those women back. News flash: It won’t.”
“I lose my appetite when I’m working. But I’ll make up for it later. I think I’ll go check on Klesko.”
She called after me as I ducked out of the tent, “At least grab a banana from the box!”
I hated being accused of having a martyr complex. My mother had raised me in the Catholic faith. I’d fallen away for years, partially because of the evil I’d seen in my job, but had returned on a whim for an Easter Mass—the cathedral had been thick with nostalgia and incense—and the service stirred up old emotions. I made a confession to a priest in Bangor and visited for coffee and conversation a few times before ghosting him. I couldn’t have told you why.
The Warden Service chaplain asserted I would find my faith again. The yearning to believe was too strong in me, she said.
In the cove, I found the Endeavor anchored at the edge of the shelf and the Selkie moored to its chain. The seabirds had made my kayak look like a Jackson Pollock if he had painted in bird shit.
I didn’t see Klesko, but the dinghy was tied up to McLeary’s boat. I called across the water from Plymouth Rock.
He emerged from the cabin, looking miserable in his damp clothes. He must not have packed a change of outfits. Surely, he could have scavenged a spare jumpsuit from one of the evidence techs. But Cruz was right about her new partner: the man became an ascetic when he worked a homicide.
“I heard you spoke with the relatives,” I said. “How did that go?”
“It’s never easy, but this was as hard as it gets. Kendra and Hillary were both close to their parents, who all fell to pieces. McLeary’s brother was as remote as can be, but he asked about her will. He lives in California. I had the feeling they were estranged. Tell me about the secret landing place you discovered.”
I explained about the secret mooring the killer had used to tie up his boat.
“It’s more evidence that exonerates Garrett Meadows. Santum seems intent on fingering the poor guy for this. I can’t possibly understand why that might be.”
Klesko refused to engage with my sarcasm.
“I heard you found the missing cell phones or what’s left of them,” he said. “I’ve torn up the Selkie looking for McLeary’s personal phone, but so far, I’ve come up empty.”
“Cruz hasn’t found McLeary’s cell in her tent, either. She thinks it might have been in her backpack when she went into the sea.”
“Unless we get lucky, I’m beginning to think we won’t find answers on Baker Island. Speaking of which, Spinney is taking you and me over to Ayers in an hour. Make sure you’re ready to go at a moment’s notice.”
“Me?”
“Don’t you want to see Stacey? Besides, I could use a sounding board, and Cruz needs to stay here until the evidence response team wraps up its work.”
“Is Rick still chasing off looky-loos?”
“It seems to be how he works through his anger.”
“I wish you’d known him back in the day. He was a hell of an officer once.”
“I’ll have to take your word on that,” my friend said. “This job breaks a lot of good men.”
“‘And afterward many are strong at the broken places.’”
He raised his eyebrows.
“It’s a line from a book,” I explained. “You’re going to need to get a statement from Spinney. I got the strong impression that his constant visits were creeping out Hillary and Kendra.”
“I think I’ll wait until after we’re off his boat before I grill him as a murder suspect. How much do you know about marine engines? I was just about to start up the Selkie’s inboard.”
“Why? Are you taking a joyride?”
“I happened to notice that McLeary has only ten gallons of fuel in the tank.”
“That’s barely enough to get back to the mainland!” I began stroking my chin again in imitation of that master of deduction, Charley Stevens. “I have an idea, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Probably not.”
“What if McLeary lied about being inshore? What if she went somewhere else yesterday—somewhere she couldn’t refuel?”
“The Selkie doesn’t have an automatic identification tracking transceiver, so there won’t be a record of her whereabouts,” he said. “It would be nice if we had her cell phone, but I can ask the attorney general to talk with her carrier.”
“What about the satellite phone? It must have GPS, too.”
His grin revealed his gray canine tooth. “That’s inspired thinking. There’s only one problem. The feds can issue a subpoena for a carrier to provide sat phone records, but the State of Maine doesn’t have the same power. We’re going to need to convince some highly intelligent and skeptical people that it’s imperative we know where Maeve McLeary went the past few days.”
“Because she’s a suspect in a double homicide.”
The frown returned. “Except we haven’t named her as a suspect.”
“There’s no reason to tell that to the judge.”
“You lie more easily than you did when we first met, Mike.”
The statement felt accusatory, but at the same time, I knew in my heart it was an accurate assessment.
“My point is you need hard evidence of McLeary’s whereabouts to rule her out as a suspect. Is that true or false?”
Klesko didn’t respond. I could tell he was disappointed in my lack of ethics. He returned to the control panel inside the cabin. He started the blower to release any trapped fuel vapors from the engine compartment. He let the fan run a few minutes to be safe.
Two things happened when he turned the ignition key. The motor chugged to life, and a high-pitched whine issued from the Selkie.
“Wait!” I said.
He stepped out of the cabin but kept the motor running. Rather than trying to shout above the engine noise, he raised his hands, palms upward. Yeah? What’s going on?
I cupped my hands to increase my volume. “That noise! What is it?”
“The boat’s short on oil! There’s a light flashing on the dash!”
“Turn it off!”
The motor sputtered until it died.
“You don’t need to get her sat phone records,” I called. “Not all of them, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know where Maeve McLeary was last night. She was anchored off the back side of Spruce Island. It was her boat Stacey and I hailed in the fog.”
“How sure are you?” he asked after he’d rowed back to the island.
“One hundred percent.”
“I don’t know, Mike. Is it possible you’re saying you recognize the sound because you want it to be true?”
“The way I see it, Maeve being anchored off Spruce last night raises more questions than it answers.”
“Care to name them?”
“One: Why would McLeary anchor off Spruce Island when Baker was just two miles away? Two: Assuming it was because of the rainstorm, why would she have left the mainland, or wherever she’d been, at all? Three: Why did she run off when Stacey and I called for help?”
His brow furrowed. “But you said the boat was anchored off Spruce when you heard the gunshot. That undermines your treating her as a potential suspect.”
“Except we can’t be sure the shot was Kendra firing at the intruder.”
“I won’t mislead the attorney general. That’s a line I will never cross even if you’re comfortable treating it like a jump rope.”
Again, I found it hard to be insulted when he knew me so well.
“What I want to know is where she was before she landed at Spruce Island.”
“How is that pertinent?”
“Because I’m stuck on the question of why the intruder chose last night to commit the murders. The storm would have made everything ten times more difficult. I refuse to believe the timing was random. He either acted because he believed McLeary was back on Baker or because he knew she wasn’t.”
Off the island a seal had raised his gray-spotted head from underwater and was watching us as if captivated by our ethical debate.
Klesko was not the kind of man to sigh, but he made the face of a person doing just that. “You read a lot of detective fiction as a kid. Didn’t you, Mike?”
“You know I did.”
“Then maybe you remember this quote: ‘Imagination is a good servant and a bad master.’”
“I never pictured you as a reader of Agatha Christie, Steve.”
“I wasn’t. But Wayne Soctomah, who trained me, loved those books. Soctomah was the one who taught me not to come to conclusions too quickly when investigating a crime. Not unless time was of the essence.”
“What makes you think time isn’t of the essence here?”
He had no answer for that one.
“I’m going to call the AG and confer with him about getting her sat phone records,” he said. “Kitteridge will be giving us time of death soon, and if the Selkie was at Spruce Island when the women were killed, it definitely rules her out as a suspect—unless someone else was using the boat.”
After Klesko wandered off, I retrieved my cell where I’d plugged it into the power bank the police had brought along. Then I took advantage of their signal booster to call Stacey. I had been procrastinating for the past hour, telling myself I needed to prepare to tell her about McLeary. But really, I’d been summoning my courage.
“Stacey,” I said. “Something’s happened here.”
“It’s about Maeve, isn’t it?”
I’d stopped bothering to ask how she sensed these things. It was enough to accept her powers.
“She killed herself, Stace.”
There was a pause during which I thought I’d lost her.
Her voice came back as a monotone. “How did she do it?”
I told her the story, omitting nothing. I apologized for not having been able to save her mentor.
“It wouldn’t have mattered. She would’ve found another way to kill herself. I’m just glad to hear that you didn’t drown, too. Hillary warned you about the currents off Baker.”
“I don’t always think before I act.”
She couldn’t help but chuckle. “That’s my line. If we ever have a kid, he’s going to be the next Evel Knievel.”
She mentioned the possibility so casually, the significance of her words almost didn’t register. I recalled Klesko’s advice about having children when you are young. I felt an overmastering need to change the subject.
“There’s something else,” I said.
“I heard about Garrett being found adrift. My hosts have a VHF radio in the kitchen, and the chatter among the fishermen has been Baker Island nonstop. Do you know how he’s doing? All I’m hearing is slander and speculation.”
I filled her in with the minimal information I possessed. When I’d exhausted the subject, I switched back to Maeve McLeary. I told Stacey how Klesko and I had deduced that the Selkie was the boat in the fog.
“Good work,” she said.
I had expected her to be more surprised. Or at least, more generous with her praise.
“Steve is calling the attorney general. He’s asking the AG to pressure the phone carrier to give us McLeary’s GPS coordinates so we can track her movements, especially yesterday after she went speeding by us in the fog.”
“There’s no need,” she said. “I can tell you exactly where Maeve was yesterday.”
“How? Where?”
“Here on Ayers Island, visiting with the Markhams.”
“What? Why?”
“Because Clay Markham was her anonymous donor.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“I went for a walk and a little girl approached me, bold as anything. She was Bear Goodale’s little sister Juniper. She asked if I’d really come from the puffin island. When I said I had, she told me she’d been to Baker Island with her family. Maeve even let her hold a baby puffin, she said. Not only that, but she claimed Clay Markham had taken a picture of her with the chick. I asked to see it, and sure enough, she came back with an amazing little portrait.”
I scanned the murmuring cove and found that the harbor seal was still watching me with his black, soulful eyes.
“That doesn’t prove Markham is ‘Anonymous,’”
“Let me finish,” she said. “Skip Ayers confirmed the Selkie was moored in the harbor all day while Maeve met with Clay and Alyce. I worked for a nonprofit, and you don’t get that kind of access to the mega-rich if you don’t already have a relationship.”
The seal let out a snort and disappeared beneath the waves. He must have heard enough out of me.
“I’m sorry for doubting you, Stacey. Klesko will need more proof, though. He’s been lecturing me about how intuitions and emotions aren’t evidence.”
“Emotions get a bad rap. More evil has been done by people denying their emotions than by people acknowledging what they truly feel. Self-deception is a soul killer.”
“You sound like a transcendentalist.”
“I was going more for Jedi knight.”
We laughed together, and I remembered again how much I loved her.