Last to Die

by Tess Gerritsen

  “This is the same room as the cocktail party,” said Frost. “See the hearth there, on the right? It’s in the other photo as well. And here …” He zoomed in on a corner of the room. “Does that look like the same crown molding?”

  “Yeah, it does,” said Jane. She squinted to read the handwritten caption from the album: OUR LAST CHRISTMAS IN GEORGETOWN. LONDON, HERE WE COME! She looked at Frost. “This was taken in DC.”

  “So that’s where the cocktail party was. The question is, why did Nicholas Clock and Olivia Yablonski get invited to a diplomat’s party? Nicholas was in finance. Olivia was a medical equipment sales rep. How and where did these three people meet?”

  “Go back to the other photo,” she said.

  Frost pulled up the image of the cocktail party, which they now knew was in Washington.

  “They look younger here,” said Jane. She swiveled around to grab the Ward family’s file from her desk and flipped it open to Erskine Ward’s curriculum vitae. “Foreign service officer, served in Rome for fourteen years, Washington for five. Then stationed in London, where he was killed a year later.”

  “So this cocktail party was held sometime during the Wards’ five-year stay in DC.”

  “Right.” She closed the file. “How did these three meet? It must have been in Washington. Or …” She looked at Frost just as the same thought seemed to spring into his head.

  “Rome,” said Frost, and he sat up straight in excitement. “Remember what that guy at NASA told us? Neil and Olivia were looking forward to their trip to Rome—where they first met each other.”

  Jane swiveled around to grab her file on the Yablonskis. “All this time, we’ve focused on Neil and his job. Kept chasing that stupid NASA and aliens shit, when it was Olivia we should have been looking at.” Bland Olivia with the boring job, who stood around looking lost at her husband’s NASA gatherings. Olivia, who regularly traveled overseas to sell medical equipment. What were you really selling, Olivia?

  Jane found the page she was searching for. “Here it is. Date of marriage, Olivia and Neil Yablonski. Fifteen years ago. She met her future husband in Rome, which would place her there during the same time Erskine Ward was working at the embassy.”

  “What about this guy?” Frost pointed at Teddy’s father, Nicholas Clock, who cut a striking and athletic figure, a man confident enough in his own skin to drink beer when everyone else was sipping wine, to sport Dockers and a golf shirt among a jacket-and-tie crowd. “Can we place Nicholas Clock in Rome around that same time? Were all three of them there?”

  Jane flipped through the file. “We don’t know enough about Clock. Most of what we’ve got is what the Saint Thomas police sent us.”

  “He was just a tourist in Saint Thomas. Down there, no one would know him.”

  “But they would know him in Providence, where he worked.” She paged through the file. “Here. Financial consultant at Jarvis and McCrane, Chapman Street.” She looked up. “Our next stop.”

  I DIDN’T WANT to go to quebec anyway.

  Claire sulked in the courtyard as she watched her excited classmates climb aboard the field trip bus. She had told Will she didn’t want to be stuck on any bus for hours, but this was a sleek new bus, not some ratty yellow clunker like most schools used. Bruno added insult to injury by shouting out the bus window, announcing all the onboard luxuries.

  “Hey, everyone, it’s got TVs! Headphones! WiFi!”

  Now Briana and the princesses came out of the building, wheeling their cute little carry-ons, which they rolled across the cobblestones in a royal procession. As they passed her, Claire heard one of them sneer, under her breath: Night Crawler.

  “Loser,” Claire shot back.

  Briana wheeled around. “I’m just going to say it right here, loud and clear, so everyone hears it. My room is locked. If I find anything missing when I get back—anything—we’ll all know who did it.”

  “Get on the bus, Briana,” Ms. Saul said with a sigh as she and Ms. Duplessis tried to shepherd their students aboard. “We have to get going now if we want to make it there by lunchtime.”

  Briana shot a poisonous glance at Claire and climbed aboard the bus.

  “Are you okay, Claire?” Ms. Saul asked gently.

  Of all the teachers at Evensong, Ms. Saul was her favorite, because she looked at you as if she really saw you, and cared. And what she saw now must be obvious: that as much as Claire denied wanting to go with them, she hated being left behind.

  “It’s only because you’re still so new to Evensong,” said Ms. Saul. “You’ll get to go on our next trip. And won’t it be nice this weekend, just the four of you, having the whole school to yourselves.”

  “I guess,” moped Claire.

  “Mr. Roman’s set up the hay bales for you, if you want to shoot a few arrows. You’ll be an expert archer by the time we get back.”

  Aren’t you afraid I’ll kill another chicken? was what Claire thought, but she kept her mouth shut as Ms. Saul climbed aboard and the doors closed. With a puff of diesel smoke, the bus pulled away and drove under the stone archway. She heard barking behind her, saw a flash of black fur as Julian’s dog shot past, chasing after the bus.

  “Bear!” Claire yelled. “Come back here!”

  The dog ignored her and tore out of the courtyard. Claire followed him all the way to the edge of the lake where he suddenly halted, his nose lifted to the air. No longer did he seem interested in the bus, which continued driving down the road and disappeared around the bend. Instead Bear turned and took off in a different direction.

  “Now where are you going?” she called out. With a sigh, she followed him around the building, toward the trail that led up the ridge. Already he was picking his way through the scrub, moving faster now, so fast that she had to scramble to keep up. “Bear, come back here,” she commanded. Watched in frustration as he slipped away into the underbrush. So much for obedience; she couldn’t get even a dog to show her any respect.

  Halfway up the ridge, she gave up chasing him and plopped down on a boulder. From here, she could just look over the school’s rooftop. It was not as spectacular a view as up at the Jackals’ Den, but this was good enough, especially on this bright morning, with the sun glittering on the lake. By now the bus would be out of the gate and on its way to Quebec. By noon, they’d be eating at some fancy French restaurant—that’s what Briana had bragged about, anyway—and there’d be a trip to the Quebec Experience museum, and a ride on an outdoor elevator that went up a cliff.

  Meanwhile, I get to sit on this stupid rock.

  She broke off a chip of lichen and tossed it over the edge. Wondered if Will and Teddy were finished with breakfast yet. Maybe they’d want to shoot arrows with her. But instead of heading back down the ridge, she flopped onto her back, stretching out like a snake warming itself on the boulder, and closed her eyes. Heard a dog’s whine and felt Bear brush up against her jeans. She stroked his back, taking comfort from the touch of his fur. What was it that made a dog’s company so comforting? Maybe the fact you never had to hide your feelings from them, never had to fake a smile for their benefit.

  “Good old Bear,” she murmured, and opened her eyes to look at him. “What did you bring back for me?”

  The dog had something in his mouth, something he did not seem willing to surrender. Only when she gave a tug on it did he finally let it drop. It was a leather glove, black. Where in these woods had Bear found a glove? It smelled bad, and it glistened with the dog’s saliva.

  Grimacing, she picked it up and felt a heaviness to it. Peeking inside, she saw something white gleaming within. She turned the glove upside down, gave it a hard shake. What came tumbling out made her scream and scramble backward, away from the object that lay stinking on the boulder.

  A hand.

  “It’s always the dogs that find them,” said Dr. Emma Owen.

  Maura and the Maine medical examiner stood in the dappled shade of the woods, insects buzzing around their faces, the air thic
k with the stench of cadaver. Maura thought of other bodies she’d examined over the years, also unearthed by dogs, whose noses are always on the alert for such ripe treasures. Although these remains were hundreds of yards up the slope, Bear had caught the scent and tracked it to this thicket, where dense underbrush partially concealed the body. The man, who appeared to be well muscled and fit, was dressed in camouflage cargo pants, a dark green windbreaker, a T-shirt, and hiking boots. A serrated knife was still strapped to his ankle, and a rifle with a telescopic sight was perched on a nearby boulder. He lay on his left side, exposing his right face and neck to the elements. Scavengers had been at work, greedily stripping away the scalp and face, gnawing at nasal cartilage, and digging into the right orbit, which now gaped empty, the socket scooped clean. Canids, thought Maura, noting the teeth marks on the remaining skin, the punctures in the thin orbital bone. Coyotes most likely. Or, in this remote area, perhaps wolves. Even in this tangle of vines, the cause of death was easy to spot: an aluminum arrow, its tip em bedded deep in the left eye, its tail feathers dyed a deep green.

  Under other circumstances, Maura might have assumed this was just an unlucky hunter, brought down in the woods by another hunter’s carelessness. But this man had been trespassing on Evensong property, and from the boulder where his rifle was positioned, he would have had a commanding view of the valley and the school below. He could have observed who arrived on the property, and who departed.

  Inured as she was to foul smells, Maura had to turn away as the body was rolled onto a plastic sheet, stirring up a stench so foul that Maura gagged and lifted her arm over her nose. Dr. Owen’s staff was fully garbed and masked but Maura, standing here as a mere observer, had settled for gloves and shoe covers, the big-city ME trying to prove she was too seasoned to let a rotting corpse defeat her.

  Dr. Owen crouched down over the body. “There’s barely persistent rigor mortis here,” she said, testing the limbs for range of motion.

  “It was fifty-one degrees last night,” one of the state police detectives said. “Balmy.”

  The medical examiner lifted the edge of the victim’s T-shirt to expose the abdomen. The changes from autolysis were obvious even from where Maura stood. Death sets off a cascade of changes in soft tissues as leaking enzymes digest proteins and disintegrate membranes. Blood cells break apart and leak through vessel walls, and in that soup of nutrients, bacteria feast, filling the abdomen with gases. Braving the stench, Maura crouched down beside Dr. Owen. She saw blue veins marbling the bloated belly and knew that if they rolled down the pants, they would find the scrotum swollen with those same gases.

  “Forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” said Dr. Owen. “You agree?”

  Maura nodded. “Based on the relatively minor amount of damage by scavengers, I’d favor the lower end of that postmortem interval. The attacks are confined to the head and neck and …” Maura paused, glancing at the bony stump poking from the jacket sleeve. “… the hand. The wrist must have been exposed. That’s how they got at it.” She wondered if Bear had sampled a taste before bringing his putrid prize to Claire. A friendly lick won’t be so welcome after this.

  Dr. Owen patted the victim’s jacket and cargo pants. “There’s something here,” she said, and withdrew a thin billfold from the cargo pocket. “And we have ID. Virginia driver’s license. Russell Remsen, six foot one, a hundred ninety pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes, thirty-seven years old.” She eyed the cadaver. “Could be. Let’s hope he has dental X-rays on file.”

  Maura stared at the victim’s face, half of it gnawed away, the other half swollen and streaked with purge fluid. A postmortem bulla had ballooned the intact eyelid into a bulging sac. On the right side, scavengers had stripped the neck of skin and muscle; the damage extended all the way down to the neckline of his clothing, where sharp teeth had already punctured and frayed the fabric, trying to tear into the thoracic outlet. Evisceration would have been next, heart and lungs, liver and spleen dragged out and feasted on. Limbs would be ripped from joints, portable prizes to be carried off to dens and pups. The forest would do its part as well, vines twisting around ribs, insects delving, devouring. In a year, she thought, Russell Remsen would be little more than bone fragments, scattered among the trees.

  “This guy wasn’t carrying your usual hunting rifle,” the state police detective said, examining the weapon perched on the boulder. With gloved hands, he brought it over to show Dr. Owen, turning it to reveal the manufacturer’s stamp on the lower receiver.

  “What kind of rifle is that?” asked Maura.

  “An M one ten. Knight’s Armament, semiautomatic with a bipod.” He looked at her, clearly impressed. “This one’s got excellent optics, twenty-round box magazine. Fires a three oh eight or a seven six two, NATO. Effective range of eight hundred meters.”

  “Holy cow,” said Dr. Owen. “You could shoot a deer in the next county.”

  “Wasn’t designed for hunting deer. It’s military issue. A very nice and very expensive sniper rifle.”

  Maura frowned at the dead man. At the camouflage pants. “What was he doing up here with a sniper rifle?”

  “Well, a deer hunter might use one of these. It’s a pretty handy weapon if you want to drop a deer at long range. But it’s kind of like using a Rolls-Royce to make a run to the grocery store.” He shook his head. “I guess this is what you’d call irony. Here he was, equipped with top-of-the-line gear, and he’s taken down by something as primitive as an arrow.” He glanced at Dr. Owen. “I take it that’s going to be the cause of death?”

  “I know cause of death seems obvious, Ken, but let’s wait until the autopsy.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  Dr. Owen turned to Maura. “You’re welcome to join me in the morgue tomorrow.”

  Maura thought of slicing into that belly, ripe with decay and foul gases. “I think I’ll pass on this autopsy,” she said and stood up. “I’m supposed to be on a holiday from Death. But He keeps finding me.”

  Dr. Owen rose to her feet as well, and her thoughtful gaze made Maura uncomfortable. “What’s going on here, Dr. Isles?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “First a suicide. Now this. And I can’t even tell you what this is. Accident? Homicide?”

  Maura focused on the arrow protruding from the dead man’s eye. “This would take an expert marksman.”

  “Not really,” said the state detective. “The bull’s-eye on an archery target is smaller than an eye socket. A decent archer could hit that from a hundred, two hundred feet, especially with a crossbow.” He paused. “Assuming he meant to hit this target.”

  “You’re saying this might have been an accident,” said Dr. Owen.

  “I’m just throwing out scenarios here,” said the cop. “Say two buddies come hunting on this land without permission. The guy with the bow spots a deer, gets excited, and lets an arrow fly. Oops, down goes his buddy. Guy with the bow freaks out and runs. Doesn’t tell anyone, ’cause he knows they were trespassing. Or he’s on probation. Or he just doesn’t want the trouble.” He shrugged. “I could see it happening.”

  “Let’s hope that is the story,” said Maura. “Because I don’t like the alternative.”

  “That there’s a homicidal archer running around these woods?” said Dr. Owen. “That is not a comforting thought, so close to a school.”

  “And here’s another disturbing thought. If this man wasn’t hunting for deer, what was he doing up here with a sniper rifle?”

  No one responded, but the answer seemed obvious when Maura gazed down at the valley below. If I were a sniper, she thought, this is where I would wait. Where I’d be camouflaged by this underbrush, with a clear view of the castle, the courtyard, the road.

  But who was the target?

  That question dogged her as she scrambled down the trail an hour later, across bare boulders, through sun and shade and sun again. She thought of a marksman poised on the hill above her. Imagined a target hatch mark trained on her back.
A rifle with an eight-hundred-meter range. Half a mile. She would never realize anyone was watching her, aiming at her. Until she felt the bullet.

  At last she stumbled out of a tangle of vines onto the school’s back lawn. As she stood brushing twigs and leaves from her clothes, she heard men’s voices, raised in argument. They came from the forester’s cottage at the edge of the woods. She approached the cottage, and through the open doorway she saw one of the detectives she’d met earlier up on the ridge. He was standing inside with Sansone and Mr. Roman. None of them acknowledged her as she stepped inside, where she saw an array of outdoorsmen’s tools. Axes and rope and snowshoes. And hanging on one wall were at least a dozen bows, as well as quivers filled with arrows.

  “There’s nothing special about these arrows,” Roman said. “You can find ’em in any sporting goods store.”

  “Who has access to all this equipment, Mr. Roman?”

  “All the students do. It’s a school, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “He’s been our archery instructor for decades,” said Sansone. “It’s a skill that teaches them discipline and focus. Valuable skills relevant to all their subjects.”

  “And all the students take archery?”

  “All those who choose to,” Roman said.

  “If you’ve been teaching for decades, you must be pretty good with a bow,” the detective said to Roman.

  The forester grunted. “Fair enough.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I hunt.”

  “Deer? Squirrels?”

  “Not enough meat on a squirrel to make ’em worth the trouble.”

  “The point is, you could hit one?”

  “I can also hit your eye at a hundred yards. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? Whether I took down that fella up on the ridge.”

  “You had a chance to examine the body, did you?”

  “Dog took us straight to him. Didn’t have to examine the body. Clear as day what killed him.”