Blind Search

by Paula Munier

  There was also a report coming in from Delphine about a wounded big bear and a dead body—human—deep in the woods of the Nemeton estate. He was closest to the scene.

  “Captain Thrasher says to watch yourself,” Delphine told him. “Detective Harrington will be out there eventually, and he won’t appreciate your being at his crime scene.”

  The head of the Major Crime Unit didn’t think much of the game-warden service. Maybe because they sometimes solved his high-profile cases for him. Not that Detective Kai Harrington would ever admit that.

  Quickly Troy wrote up the violations, walked back to the Buskey boys, and handed Daryl the paperwork. “Don’t miss this hearing.”

  “Right,” said Daryl.

  Troy confiscated the buck and the gun and the ammo and both father’s and son’s hunting licenses and sent them on their way. He’d drop the deer at the tagging station on the way to the crime scene. The meat would go to a needy family; whenever possible, confiscated game went to local food banks.

  Susie Bear whined.

  “Sorry, girl.”

  The search for the bullets and spent casings would have to wait.

  Bears—and murder—came first.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Vermont has one of the densest black-bear populations in the country, approximately one bear for every three square miles, most commonly found in the Green Mountains and Northeast Kingdom.

  —VERMONT FISH AND WILDLIFE REGULATIONS

  WHILE THEY WAITED FOR THE WARDEN, Elvis continued his guard duty by the corpse as Mercy talked to the suspects. That’s how she thought of them now, no matter how highbrow-Yankee the accent, as with the Montgomerys, or how good the hair, as with Cara Farrow.

  Small talk, mostly, so as not to alarm them, and not to be accused of jumping the gun and doing law enforcement’s job, as Detective Harrington would do regardless. He didn’t like her or her dog. And he liked Troy Warner and Susie Bear even less.

  She started with the women, who were gathered together on one side of the crime scene while the men talked in low voices with Feinberg on the other. Gunnar stood apart with his dogs.

  An easy question first, she thought. She didn’t want to upset Katharine, who seemed to have regained her composure, and with it, her natural reserve. “How long have you been hunting?”

  “Since childhood,” Katharine said, her eyes carefully avoiding the corpse. “Shooting, rather than hunting. I’m content to ride my horses, and to settle for clay shooting when I desire to shoot.”

  “But not your husband.”

  “No.” Katharine looked at Mercy. “He’s thrilled by the idea of big-game hunting, just as his father was. I’m sure he talked poor Daniel into this hunting party. And now look what’s happened.”

  “It’s not his fault.” Lea took her friend’s hand and squeezed it.

  It’s somebody’s fault, thought Mercy. Probably somebody right here. But aloud she asked, “How well did you know Alice?”

  “We met her in Boston.” Katharine closed her eyes. “At a party held by our friends, Jean-Paul and Sandrine d’Arcy. She’s Parisian, like they are. She redesigned their house on Beacon Hill. So beautiful, yet fresh and modern, and still très chic, as only the French can be.” She sighed and opened her eyes. “Later, when we bought a penthouse in Trinity Place, Blake and I hired her to redo it.”

  “I see.”

  “Only four thousand square feet, but with views of the Charles River.”

  Four thousand square feet hardly sounded small to Mercy, whose own cabin was barely a quarter that size.

  “It was a horror when we bought it,” remembered Katharine. “No style at all. Alice transformed it into a postmodern Louis XVI gem.”

  Mercy couldn’t even begin to imagine what that might look like. But her mother would know.

  “Gorgeous,” said Lea. “So gorgeous it was featured in Architectural Digest. I took the pictures.”

  “Vulgar, I know,” said Katharine, her cheeks high with color. “But I did it for Alice. I—” Her voice caught.

  “Katharine believed Alice could use the exposure,” explained Lea. “She is—was—so young. Her career was just taking off.”

  “When we decided to renovate the inn, we immediately thought of Alice.” Katharine’s voice was steady now.

  “The inn?”

  “The Bluffing Bear Inn, at Bluffing Bear Mountain.”

  Mercy grinned. “We used to go skiing there when I was a kid.”

  Katharine sniffed. “Well, then you’ll understand how much it needs renovation. I doubt it’s changed a bit since you were there.”

  “Right.” Mercy had always loved the ski lodge, which had a Jetsons space-age vintage kitschy appeal even back then. But apparently that wasn’t postmodern Louis XVI enough for the likes of Katharine Montgomery.

  “I thought this hunting party would be a great opportunity for Alice to show Daniel some drawings and design proposals for the inn,” said Katharine. “Now that will never happen.”

  Mercy frowned. “What’s Daniel got to do with it?”

  “We’re transforming the inn into a major resort. The biggest in Vermont. Daniel and the Farrows are our partners.”

  “So this hunting party was intended for business as well as pleasure.”

  “Yes,” said Katharine sadly.

  Mercy directed her next question to Lea, whose fancy camera still hung around her neck. “Do you hunt?”

  “No, I’d rather shoot the foliage,” says Lea. “I came to hang out with my friends. We went to school together. Katharine, Blake, and me.”

  “Caspar, too.” Cara Farrow spoke for the first time.

  “He was a couple of years behind us,” said Lea.

  “It was a lifetime ago,” said Katharine.

  “Before I was even born,” said Cara.

  “Indeed.” Katharine made it sound as if that were her loss.

  “Did you know Alice?” Mercy turned to Cara, whose brief interest in the proceedings had waned once more, if the bored expression marring her pretty features were any indication.

  “No.” She flipped her shiny hair over one shoulder. “But Blake and Katharine’s penthouse is nice. I thought maybe she could redo our place in Malibu.” She chewed on a long bright-blue fingernail. “I guess now we’ll have to find someone else.”

  If looks could kill, the one Katharine and Lea both gave Cara would have made her the second murder victim of the day. Mercy changed the subject before the group broke up.

  “How did you all meet Daniel?”

  “Blake and Daniel are on the board of Atlas Oil with my husband,” said Cara.

  Mercy bit back a smile at the proprietary way she pronounced my husband.

  Katharine nodded. “We introduced Lea to Daniel.”

  “They set us up.” Lea smiled. “Very kind.”

  “And effective,” said Katharine, smiling back.

  “It will never last,” said Cara to Mercy, as if Katharine and Lea could not hear her. Prompting them to walk off in the direction of the men.

  “How long do we have to stay here?” Cara tossed her hair again, as if she knew how the sun filtering through the trees threw her and her hair into the spotlight. Maybe she did. “I need to go back to the house. I have work to do. For my TV show.”

  Cara Farrow, thought Mercy, with sudden recognition. Also known as Cara Tyler, model and host of the reality TV show Be Hair Now, where aspiring hairdressers competed for chairs at the top salons in the country. Mercy’s mother loved that show, and was always pestering her to watch it, in the unlikely event that her daughter might take more interest in fixing her hair.

  Cara paused, waiting for her to say something, anything, acknowledging her celebrity.

  “Yes,” she said finally, not wanting to encourage this line of conversation, which she suspected could become a long soliloquy on the virtues of hair product and the vagaries of her own messy tresses.

  But Cara was already off and running on the latest trends i
n coiffure. The hair model was encouraging her to try flamboyage, whatever that was, when Mercy excused herself and went to talk to the men.

  They were huddled together, speaking in low, tense voices, like ballplayers discussing the next play in a tight game with just seconds on the clock. Ethan stood apart, leaning against a trio of close-standing birch trees, each of his long arms grasping a branch, as if he were folding himself into the forest. For the first time, the veneer of city sophistication slipped. There was a wildness to him now. He looked like he belonged in the woods.

  At her approach, Feinberg broke away from the huddle.

  “I suppose there’s little doubt that this is murder,” he said quietly.

  Mercy glanced over at the perfectly hit target that was this victim. “Very little doubt.”

  He grimaced. “You’ll find whoever did this, won’t you?”

  Before she could answer, Caspar Farrow thrust himself between them, brushing his hand across the breast pockets of Mercy’s hunter-orange vest in the process.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  But she could see that he wasn’t sorry at all.

  “Danny, we can’t hang around this forest forever.”

  “No one can leave until the police arrive.” She used her MP voice, which in her experience was the only way to deal with a man like Farrow.

  “That’s absurd.” He threw a harrumph her way before turning back to his host. “Isn’t this your land?”

  “This is my land, Caspar. And my policy is to cooperate fully with law enforcement.”

  “How well did you know Alice de Clare?” she asked Farrow.

  “Not at all. The wife wanted her to do our place in Malibu. And of course she was under consideration for the project at the inn.” As he spoke, his ruddy face reddened even more.

  Mercy had the feeling he was lying. “You hadn’t seen her either here at Nemeton or before in Boston?”

  “No.” Farrow was still lying.

  “As far as I know, the only people here who’d actually met her in person are Blake and Katharine. And Ethan.”

  Blake stepped forward at the sound of his name. “We met her when she did our Trinity Place penthouse. Lovely girl. And talented.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Katharine can be, well, particular about such matters, though she was pleased with the results. So pleased that naturally we thought of Alice when it came time to redesign the inn.”

  “When was last time you saw her?”

  Blake seemed taken aback at the question, and she wondered if that was because of the question itself or rather because she was asking it. He looked to Feinberg, who nodded for him to respond. “It must’ve been a couple of weeks ago. At the penthouse in Boston. We were showing Alice old photos of the inn in its prime.”

  “And you didn’t see her this morning?”

  “No, it was my understanding that her plane was late and so her arrival was delayed.”

  Mercy knew that law enforcement would ask all these questions and more to nail down the time lines of every suspect, but she still wanted to get some sense of everyone’s relationship with the victim. Ethan aside, they all claimed that relationship to be strictly professional. But that hardly ever proved the case.

  She moved onto Ethan. There was always a temptation to see the people you’d known from childhood as they were then, only taller. But that could be a dangerous assumption. He was half a dozen years older than she was, and he’d always treated her with a sort of distant benevolence, letting her tag along on walks in the woods or skateboarding through town to Lulu’s Ice Cream Shoppe.

  But this Ethan Jenkins was not the blasé teenager she remembered. This Ethan Jenkins was a strong-willed man trying hard to control his emotions.

  “I’m so sorry.” She took his hand and squeezed it gently. And he let her, although he did not squeeze back.

  “I loved her,” he said simply.

  “Yes. I can see that.”

  “And now she’s gone. I just don’t understand how this could have happened.” Ethan looked up through the trees to the sky as if the answer to his questions were hidden in the clouds. He turned a fierce gaze on Mercy. “I’m going to find out who did this to her. And they are going to pay.”

  “I understand how you feel.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  He thought about that. “I suppose you do. Mom told me what happened to you in Afghanistan.”

  “Yes.” Ethan’s mother, Lillian Jenkins, and her grandmother Patience had been telling each other everything about their lives since before Mercy and Ethan were born. She changed the subject. “When did you meet Alice?”

  “At the office. In Manhattan.” He smiled a little. “I was her contact at the firm, you see, advising her on the portfolio she needed to present to Mr. Feinberg and other investors.”

  “For the redesign of Bluffing Bear Inn.”

  “Yes. I took her to lunch at the Jockey Club. We had martinis. She was…” Ethan’s voice trailed off, and for a moment Mercy lost him to the memory of happier days. Finally, he looked back at her with hooded eyes. “She was … spectacular.”

  “You fell in love.”

  Ethan laughed, and Mercy heard the man’s heart break. “I fell by the second martini. It took Alice a little longer.”

  “And when did you last see her?”

  Ethan tilted his head back up to the sky. “This morning. We had a fight.” He jerked his chin back down and stared directly into Mercy’s eyes. “No one knows. Uh, knew. About us. Alice didn’t want anyone to know. Not yet. I thought that was ridiculous.”

  “I’m afraid everyone knows now.”

  “So be it. I want everyone to know. And I want everyone to know I’m going to find her killer.”

  Elvis yelped twice, running for the edge of the blowdown. Abandoning his post.

  “Excuse me,” said Mercy, and jogged after him. Before she could catch up to the headstrong shepherd, he boomeranged back toward her, an enormous Newfoundland retriever mix on his heels. Susie Bear.

  Troy Warner followed. He nodded at her, and in that brief nod of recognition Mercy felt a line of energy as straight and true as a well-aimed arrow hitting her right in the solar plexus.

  The game warden grinned at her. “I should have known.”

  “Hi, Troy.”

  He held her gaze for a moment. She flushed, remembering what Brodie had said about Madeline Warner being back in town. When Madeline married Troy, she’d been the most beautiful girl in Northshire. But the marriage hadn’t lasted. According to her grandmother, she’d run off with a flatlander from Florida a couple of years ago. Mercy wondered if Madeline were back in town to see her mother or Troy. Or both.

  “If there’s anything amiss on my property, we can always count on Mercy to find it.” Feinberg joined them, while the rest of the hunting party regrouped, all together in one anxious cluster. Gunnar remained with his dogs, now leashed but none too happy about it. “Maybe I should put you on retainer.”

  “I still haven’t found that last folly,” she said, referring to an art installation hidden somewhere on the Nemeton estate. The artist had been murdered before he could reveal its location. Feinberg had asked her to find it, as she’d found his murderer, but so far she had failed to do so.

  “You will,” he said.

  “Agreed,” said Troy. “Now let me see the body.”

  He strode over to the duct-taped area. “Your handiwork, I presume?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll leave you to it.” The billionaire excused himself and retreated to his guests.

  Troy slipped on plastic gloves and handed her a pair while she filled him in on the day’s events.

  “Shot right through the heart,” she said.

  “Bull’s-eye.”

  “Gunnar says she was at the wrong place, at the wrong time.”

  “An accident?” He shook his head. “You don’t believe that.”

  “No.” Sh
e waited for him to tell her why.

  “To make a shot like that with a longbow, most archers couldn’t be more than thirty, thirty-five yards away. And given how thickly wooded it is around the blowdown, he wouldn’t have had a clear shot unless he were pretty close in.”

  “Tree stand?”

  “The angle’s wrong.” He pointed to the arrow sticking out of Alice de Clare’s chest. “Almost a perfect ninety-degree angle. Whoever shot her was not above her, but on the same plane.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Dr. Darling, the medical examiner, greeted them with a big smile. She was a short, cheerful middle-aged woman who reminded Mercy of a pug. All charm and cleverness in one energetic little package. Elvis and Susie Bear loved her, telling her so with hard wags of their tails. She gave them big hugs. She wasn’t that much bigger than they were.

  “That was fast,” said Mercy. You could wait for hours sometimes for the Major Crime Unit to show up, depending on weather and traffic and how busy they were attending other crime scenes.

  “What Daniel Feinberg wants, Daniel Feinberg gets.” She waved an arm at the Crime Scene Search techs who accompanied her. “Lovely to see you, Mercy. But does it always have to be a murder? We could just have lunch, you know.”

  Mercy smiled. “I would love that. Elvis, too.”

  “Better make yourselves scarce,” warned the doctor as she suited up for her examination of the body. “Harrington should be right behind us.” She grinned at them. “But he won’t stay long. He’s wearing a new suit.”

  Troy and Mercy stepped aside and let the CSS team do its work. Mercy introduced the game warden to the rest of the hunting party, biting back a laugh when Caspar Farrow complained to Troy that she and Elvis had sabotaged his chance at snagging the bear with bow and arrow. How he recovered quickly enough to take him down with a bullet instead.

  “I know I hit it,” said Farrow. “I would have gone after it and finished the job—if that woman hadn’t gone and gotten herself killed.”

  “He missed,” said Cara, giving Troy a shameless once-over that reminded Mercy how good-looking he was in that earnest way of his. Her husband didn’t seem to notice, and if Troy did, he didn’t show it.