Where you been, boss?” Sammie asked. “We were expecting you hours ago.”
With his free hand, Joe scratched his aching head in frustration, staring at the pay phone Lyn must have used to call him earlier. It was dark now, and there was no sign of her anywhere.
“I got held up. What’ve you got?”
There was a pause from the other end as Sam weighed this uncharacteristic terseness.
“Sorry,” he added. “Bad day.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No. I’m okay. Just distracted.”
“More family stuff?”
His irritation flared. “What’ve you got, Sam?”
He had her attention. In all their years together, he’d probably snapped twice at her like that. At most.
“Got it, boss. Sorry. I’ll start with the headline grabber, in case someone ambushes you with it. Les was interviewing Todd Putnam outside the P and P office on Putney Road when Todd took off, presumably to kill his wife because of Les’s inference that something was going on between Karen and Wayne Castine. Long story short, Les gave chase and they were almost hit by a train.”
Joe rolled his eyes toward the starlit sky. “What? You are shitting me. Is Les okay?”
“He’s fine. They’re both fine. Todd ran across the road and up the railroad embankment, with Les in hot pursuit. Neither one of them heard or saw the northbound train until it basically wiped Todd’s nose for him. But it missed and we put him in custody.”
“Jesus,” Joe muttered, both in reaction to the story, and because he was so distant from them—and under less than legitimate circumstances. Rationally, he knew he couldn’t have done anything had he been standing beside Lester at the time. But these people were like family to him, as close to his heart as Lyn, if in a totally different way, and he was feeling guilty and angry that he’d been AWOL when he shouldn’t have been.
“You’re sure he’s okay?” he repeated. “No after-effect aches or pains? He did get whacked by that jerk on Manor Court, remember.”
“He’s fine, boss,” Sam reassured him. “I promise.”
“All right, all right,” Joe let it go.
“It will get on the news, though,” she continued, “It was rush hour, and a bunch of commuters saw it from the road. I called the paper and gave them our version, to head off any nosiness. I hope it’ll hold them.”
“Okay,” he accepted. He began walking the length of the parking lot, looking for anything that might tell him of Lyn’s whereabouts. “What else?”
“We did interview Todd afterward. He’s pissed enough to kill Wayne now, but he swears he didn’t know about the affair until Les spilled the beans.”
“Lester actually told him about that?” Joe asked incredulously.
“No, no. I wondered the same thing. Les only mentioned that Wayne had been to the trailer. Todd just jumped to the right conclusion, probably because he and Karen have been there before. I mean, we already know about her habits—any port in a storm. If you ask me, Todd probably plays by the same rules. Anyhow, he has an alibi for the night Wayne was killed. Plus, we got something else.”
“What?”
“Remember that blood sample the crime lab collected off Wayne’s body? The one that wasn’t his?”
“Right,” Joe said. “They sent it out to be expanded, or whatever. The one with the six loci—belongs to a male.”
“Right. Well, to figure out either who that is or who he’s related to, we’ve been collecting DNA from everyone we can who lives in that trailer, which so far includes Todd, his wife, and Dan Kravitz. Willy also got a sample from Sally, Dan’s daughter. The punch line is that whoever that blood belongs to, he’s related to Karen—that much they can already tell, even before the expansion. So, we’re now looking at one of the three sons.”
Joe stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes straight ahead.
In the ensuing silence, Sam asked, “Boss? You there?”
“Yeah,” he answered dully.
“You okay? You sound weird.”
“Fine.” He was staring at Lyn’s empty car.
Sam wasn’t sure. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Well, we think that gives us enough for a court order, right? I mean that’s the way we’d like to go, so we can round up the rest of the family’s DNA and maybe nail down a solid suspect.”
Joe was circling the car slowly, studying it for anything unusual. “Sounds good. Go for it.”
“I don’t see little Richard playing a part,” Sam continued. “Which leaves Nicky or Ryan.”
Joe reached out and tugged at the driver’s door. It was locked. “Damn.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he told her. “Include a cut in the warrant.”
“A cut?”
Joe scowled, the distraction with Lyn’s car making him want to simply throw the cell phone into the harbor. “A cut, a wound,” he said testily. “Something to explain why the blood was on the corpse in the first place.”
He could tell he’d brought her up short.
“Right. Got it.”
“It’s not a great blood sample,” he explained. “And it may not improve with the mini-STR expansion, which means we’ll need more than just DNA to make a case stick.”
“Like a cut,” she said. “No problem.”
“Keep in mind,” he added, virtually thinking on autopilot, “that won’t be enough, either. When did the bloodstain get there? Before the killing? Afterward? It doesn’t necessarily point to the killer. We know it belongs to a male, but that may not be relevant, and there may be others that the lab missed. Plus, what I’m calling a cut could’ve been a nose bleed, meaning you won’t be able to find it now.”
“I understand.”
“And last as well as least, probably, have we absolutely ruled out all the other males related to Karen? Does she have a brother in town we don’t know about yet? Or a father or uncle? We’ve still a long way to go with just the standard case-building here.”
She was clearly taking notes by now. “Right, right.”
“You know all this shit,” he concluded. “Call me back when you get more.”
She hesitated before asking, “You’re not coming in anytime soon?”
He thought about lying, bringing her into his turmoil. She deserved more than he was giving her. They all did.
“No,” he said. “Keep in touch.”
He closed the phone, pocketed it, and pressed both his hands against his throbbing temples. God damn it, Lyn. Where are you?
Lyn was looking at Wellman Beale staring down at her, after an engine-thrumming, two-hour voyage across smooth seas. Ever since childhood, she’d preferred any and all of the discomforts of an open deck to the diesel-tainted warmth of a fishing boat’s cabin. Age had done nothing to change that.
“What now?” she asked querulously, her nausea as yet unresponsive to the engine’s silence. She’d managed to reposition herself, so that she was no longer supine. She was now sitting up, with her back against the paneling.
His eyes hardened. “Watch it. I could stop being Mr. Nice Guy.”
She laughed sharply. “Right. Pardon the hell out of me. Wouldn’t want you to kidnap me or anything.”
In the few seconds that they glared at each other, she began wondering how far she could push the man, and even why, aside from pure rage.
For the moment, he merely shook his head and muttered, “Fucking broads—what monster even invented you bitches?”
“Problems with Mommy?” she shot back without thinking.
He leaned into her fast as she mentally kicked herself, placing his hand flat against her chest, and pressing her hard against the hull.
“Don’t think for a goddamn minute that if I threw you overboard right now, anybody would know or care.”
She knew she should now keep quiet, but his words proved too provocative.
“That’s right,” she said, trying to breathe. “ ’Cause you’ve had practice with that, haven’t you?”
He straightened, looking baffled. “What the fuck is your problem?”
“You’re the one with the problem,” she countered. “I just wanted to talk, but . . .”
“Oh, bullshit,” he interrupted her. “I know exactly what you want. You walk into a biker bar, say your name is Silva and that you want a meet, and you think I can’t put that together? I have been harassed by the cops about this crap, they sicced the prosecutor onto me, and when that didn’t stick, they even spilled it to some fucking reporter, who went creeping around asking all kinds of questions. I have just about had it with the name Silva.”
“You killed my father and my brother,” she said, fixing him with her eyes.
He returned the look. “You are full of shit.”
He briefly made fists of his hands, his whole body a study of frustration, and she thought he might beat her. He fished into his back pocket instead, extracted a switchblade, and sprang it open with an ominous snap.
Lyn felt her stomach turn over.
“Turn around,” he ordered. “We’re going ashore.”
Relieved, she cooperated, allowing him to cut the tape from her wrists.
“Stand up and keep your yap shut,” he continued, pushing her toward the ladder. “And I mean it, not one word.”
They climbed up into the darkened wheelhouse, and from there to the stern, where Lyn discovered that they were tied up on the edge of a small, almost empty town. She looked around, trying to distinguish its features by a line of streetlights stretching out beyond the end of the landing. To the left of them were several more docks, the mysteriously dark and tranquil oil-black water of the bay, and in the distance—at a ninety-degree angle—a large humpbacked bridge, arcing to the opposite shore. This had to be Lubec, complete with its span to Canada. In fact, she now remembered from planning those vacation trips with her father, the bridge was actually connected to Campobello Island, made famous as the summer retreat of Franklin Roosevelt. Back in those days, however, Abílo Silva had only talked about Lubec. They’d never been here as a family.
“Come on, come on.” Beale pushed her again, getting her to climb the rail, latch on to a ladder, and pull herself up.
She strolled to where the dock met the road, and read on a sign that the street straight ahead was predictably named Water Street. There was a restaurant nearby, barely populated, a few cars parked by the curb, and only one pedestrian, halfway down the block and walking away.
“Go right,” Beale ordered in a low voice, prodding her with a discreetly held gun.
A second sign told her they were actually on Commercial Street, which she now made an effort to memorize. Out in the gloom of the inner bay, to her right, she could barely make out some distant fish pens—gigantic, round cages—used to raise domestic salmon. Lubec was at the base of the Bay of Fundy, with one of the world’s greatest tidal exchanges—crucial for flushing the wire pens free of the waste of thousands of penned-up fish.
This town, she recalled, steadying herself mentally, had once thrived on the fishing business, then the lobster trade, then the sea urchin harvest, and now domestic salmon, all with ever-diminishing returns for the general population. No wonder Lubec felt like a ghost town—it was far from any of its former glories.
It was also quickly slipping from her sight. As Beale kept prodding her down the street, the lights of the main drag dropped back, as did the distant view of the bridge, until they were walking completely alone, in the virtual darkness, their path illuminated only by the moon above. They were heading for a derelict collection of abandoned buildings—either an old fish-packing factory or some other kind of plant.
“What are you doing?” she asked nervously.
“Shut up.”
A hundred feet farther on, he guided her off the street, down a dirt embankment, and up against the wall of one of the low buildings.
“Stay.” Beale pulled a key from his pocket and fitted it to a padlock hanging from a rough plywood door cut into the wall. He removed the lock, slid back the hasp, and kicked the door open with his foot.
“Go.”
She went cautiously, completely blind in the total darkness.
A sudden narrow shaft of light shot forth from a small flashlight in his hand. “Down that way.”
She could make out a series of rooms ahead, all interconnected via a string of aligned doorways. There was rusted and broken equipment everywhere, and a thick carpet of debris and trash underfoot.
“What’re you going to do?” she asked again.
He grabbed her hair from behind and pulled her head back, speaking directly into her ear. “I told you to shut the fuck up. Walk.”
Still holding her hair, he propelled her through the first door, making her stumble. Two rooms later, they stopped. In the middle of the floor was a square hole, the top of a ladder protruding from its depths.
“Down we go,” he said.
The satisfied tone of his voice made her fear what he truly meant.
A trim young woman in uniform slid out of the green Maine Marine Patrol pickup, crossed the parking lot, and entered the café as Joe rose from the counter stool to greet her. It was getting late and he was the only customer left.
They shook hands just inside the door.
“Joe Gunther?” she asked. “Randy Coffin. Cathy Lawless said you needed help.”
“I’m up the proverbial creek,” he admitted. “I really appreciate your coming.”
“She told me a friend of yours may have met someone at the pier and then vanished?”
“I know it’s a little lame, and maybe a total waste of your time.”
She shook her head. “Not if the guy was Wellman Beale. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“That’s what she told me on the phone,” he admitted, and in concise detail, told her how Beale, the Silvas, and he had become intertwined—all while leading her to a stool and buying her a cup of coffee.
“But,” he concluded ten minutes later, “I don’t know what happened to Lyn. It’s got me really worried. That’s why I called Cathy. I still didn’t expect you to come out in the middle of the night.”
Coffin raised her eyebrows at him. “You’d do the same for me in Vermont, wouldn’t you?”
She smiled and touched his cup with her own. “Well, what’s good for Vermont law enforcement works for us, too.”
She drained the mug, placed it on the counter, and stood up, adjusting her service belt. “So, let’s go disturb a few people.”
“You got some ideas?” Joe asked, dropping a bill beside the empty mugs.
“This is my patch,” she explained, talking over her shoulder as she headed for the door. “That’s why Cathy called me. I spend more time working snitches on shore than I do on patrol nowadays, and believe me, you have no clue what snoops are till you’ve seen a fishing community.”