Death in Rough Water

by Francine Mathews

  And what in the hell is Windy Harbor? Merry thought. The name had leaped out at her from Tom Baldwin’s blueprints, scattered at her feet. A development of some kind, but she wasn’t able to study it long enough. The name didn’t ring a bell. The day before, she’d obtained a listing of Baldwin Builders’ f ifteen current projects from Tom’s helpful secretary. She’d swear Windy Harbor was not among them. Speculative, he’d called it; and he’d been anxious to tuck it out of sight. Not before she noticed an unfamiliar name—Oceanside Resorts—and a Delaware incorporation, written in small block letters on the lower left-hand corner of the top sheet. Had Tom come by a competitor’s plans? Or was he forming a partnership with another developer? Big business was very hush-hush.

  And with everything else on her plate, Merry thought irritably as she parked the Explorer on Chestnut, why did she care?

  Chapter 20

  Matt Bailey was leaning against the evidence locker when Merry walked in. He had a mug of coffee in his hand and a bleary expression around the eyes, both habitual at eight in the morn­ing. He rarely looked fully awake before noon, nor did he make much effort to work until after lunch. He claimed that he accomplished more in a few hours of focused attention than the rest of them did with half­hearted efforts throughout the day, and no one was interested or out­raged enough to challenge him. It was simply one more way Bailey tried to spin his performance.

  “Mer! Hey, everybody!” he yelled in the general direction of the dispatch room. “I want it known that I was actually in the off ice to­day before Detective Meredith Folger. Sleeping on the job, Mer? Not enough to do?”

  “I had a breakfast meeting,” Merry muttered, wishing for the strength to ignore him. She tried instead to sweep by, head high. He grabbed her arm.

  “Got the case just about wrapped up,” he said, in a conf idential tone.

  “Oh yeah?” Poor Clarence must have been working overtime. Jackie Alcantrara had limped into port Saturday morning with a thunderous look on his face, the Swede in smiling good health, half a hold’s worth of bottom f ish, and a busted oil pressure gauge. His engine had died, off and on, for the better part of twenty-four hours, and he was ready to walk away from the Lisboa Girl without a backward glance. Bailey had chosen that moment to request his f ingerprints, and Jackie had actually swung at him. Without the Swede to restrain him, he might have started a f istf ight in the middle of the boat basin. Bailey was presently nursing a grudge.

  He had followed Jackie home in order to hear both crewmen protest their innocence and aff irm each other’s whereabouts on the night in question. Then he surveyed Jackie’s closets and found candidates for beige linen and silk f ibers among his wife’s clothes. The trash was next, where he’d come up with plenty of magazines to store in his police-issue SUV, without explaining to Connie Alcantrara why her out­dated Peoples and Cosmopolitans interested him. Then he’d rousted Clarence from his Saturday peace and told him to get to work.

  The crime scene chief had replied mildly that most things could wait until Monday, except his weekend, and had shut the door in Bailey’s face. He’d been closeted in his tiny lab most of yesterday, however, and de­spite her antipathy for Bailey, Merry admitted she was interested to know what Clarence had found.

  “You want to talk about it?” she said.

  “Sure. Never too busy to offer a few pointers to a colleague.”

  “Drop by my off ice when you’ve got a chance.”

  “So the way I f igure it, Jackie goes to sea in search of an alibi and has Connie do the number on Del,” Bailey was saying. “She’s wearing her beige silk blouse and her beige linen pants, and some of her blond hair gets left behind on the f loor. We haven’t found a piece of copper jewelry yet, but if it broke in the struggle, she may have gotten rid of it.” He sat back in his chair and raised his heels to Merry’s desk, the picture of complacency.

  “Her hair is dyed.”

  “What?”

  “I misspoke. Forgive me. Her hair is bleached, and then dyed.”

  “So?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Bailey, don’t you remember any of your training? Bleached hair has dark roots. The blond hairs at the scene didn’t. Which means they were from a naturally blond person. Like the Swede. I suggest you take a sample from his head.” Merry pulled her half-glasses from her nose and stared at him balefully. “Or wait until Howie gets back from the Cape and ask him if one of Jackie’s old shipmates happens to be blond. Connie didn’t do it. The mere notion of her shov­ing a harpoon in Del’s chest is laughable. Del would have had her disarmed and decked in thirty seconds.”

  “I wouldn’t be so certain, Detective,” Bailey said stubbornly, staring over her head. Lines of pique settled around his nose and mouth, and with a resolute gesture, he stood and turned for the door. “You can’t know what Del or Connie would have done, and it’s unprofessional to suggest your feelings should carry any weight. I’d hoped the daughter of the police chief would look at the evidence instead of following her gut instinct. But women are usually emotional f irst, and rational when it’s too late.”

  “Has Clarence had a chance to look at the prints, Bailey?”

  He stiffened. “I’ve asked him to send them to the state crime lab for expert matching.”

  Meaning that Clarence was no expert in Bailey’s mind. Jackie’s prints must not have looked like those on the threatening letters or the scotch bottle. Interesting. Jackie had all but ruled himself out of suspicion. At the very least, he’d bought himself some time. Even in the case of murder, Bailey wouldn’t get the results back from Boston in under a week.

  Sometimes an alibi is just an alibi, she thought. But if not Jackie, then who? It has to be one of Howie’s guys. He’s been gone all weekend. Maybe he’ll show up today.

  Bailey let himself out.

  Funny thing about plastic explosives. They were useful in the deto­nation world because the plastic medium stabilized a highly volatile sub­stance—nitroglycerin—into something that could be cut, torn, molded like putty, and dropped on its head without destroying its handler. No need to worry about transporting this stuff like a newborn baby. Those sweat-tingling moments immortalized in a thousand movies, when the nitroglycerin tube falls through the air under the close-up lens, only to be caught at the last second by an agonized hand—those moments had gone the way of John Wayne’s rattlesnake smile.

  Merry had pored over the technical manual Jim Hayes left for her education. The arson expert had taken a liking to her—perhaps because she was so openly humble on the topic of his expertise, so frank in admitting she knew nothing about explosives beyond Hollywood’s special effects.

  Though it burned with destructive force once triggered, plastic ex­plosive left behind a residue that the clever could read as readily as a signature. The bait box recovered from the shallows of South Beach, for example, which had held this particular bit of explosive, told Jim Hayes not only the name of its manufacturer, but the number of its batch. Plastech Explosives Incorporated—the manufacturer in question—was only too happy to avoid liability for arson and sent its shipping records to Bill Carmichael at the Massachusetts State Police. Merry now had a complete list of those professionals—road engineers, construction com­panies, Navy SEAL units, and the like—who had received explosive from the batch. Baldwin Builders was not among them. Nor was the name Joshua Field. She had even searched the list for Boston University, think­ing perhaps a chemistry lab had obtained the explosive and Field had pocketed it before leaving for the summer. But here, too, she struck a dead end.

  It was just possible, she reasoned, that Baldwin’s Lenox site manager ordered plastique under his own name. And so she was poring over the list—which was organized not by alphabet but by shipping date—for a Barry Heinecker. Or Hemecker—it was tough to tell from Tom’s handwriting. There were three hundred entities listed over ten pages. She went through them several times, tic
king off the names with a pencil point. No Heinecker. No Hemecker. Nothing to connect Lenox to Nan­tucket. And that left her—or Bill Carmichael—with a case-by-case investigation of each recipient of explosive, hoping against hope that somebody’d had some plastique stolen, or failed to receive the ex­pected shipment, or could point to an employee with a lifelong grudge against Nantucket Island. Prospects, at the very least, looked tedious.

  She picked up the phone and dialed Lenox. Nothing but an an­swering machine in a closed off ice. Merry tugged on her hair and studied the list of names for a moment; it swam beneath her eyes. In­teresting as Jim Hayes had managed to make bomb investigation, her heart wasn’t in this one. After a moment, she thrust the list under a pile of reports and opened her laptop. Time to start looking for Sara’s father.

  “Did you ever get to the fruit salsa? With the cranberry dressing?”

  There was no answer from the inert form in the queen-sized bed. Peter Mason shifted uncomfortably in his chair and glanced out the win­dow, preferring the bustle of tourist life to Tess Starbuck’s silence. Then he cursed himself for a coward and got up.

  Her face, when he sat down on the edge of the mattress, was turned away from him. He knew she was awake by the line of eyelash visible against the pillow; the lids were at half-mast. But for all her connection to the conscious world, she might as well be in dreamland. He reached a f inger to brush back her hair. Its auburn brightness was dimmed and slack. She f linched and moved away from him.

  “What do you want us to do, Tess?” he said softly.

  No answer.

  “Leave you alone, right?”

  Her breathing quickened for an instant, then fell back into shallow­ness. Peter felt a wave of impatience grip him, and thrust it away with effort. He wanted to pull Tess out of bed, show her Will sitting de­spondent in the empty kitchen below, show her the blank tables in the restaurant, the produce rotting in the refrigerators. Instead he sighed, and looked away. And the doorbell rang.

  Will’s light feet, running to answer it with the haste of every sixteen-year-old. A murmur of voices, indistinguishable. And then Merry Folger, standing in the bedroom doorway in a slim khaki skirt that made her seem taller and thinner than she was, a blouse the color of melon, her hair like corn silk.

  Merry nodded in his direction, her face carefully composed, and looked at the woman in the bed.

  “Tess,” she said. “I know you’re not feeling well, but I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

  Tess’s eyes f luttered, but she made no sound. Merry pulled up a chair, set her purse on the f loor, and leaned toward Tess’s face. “I’ve got to talk about Del.” She looked at Peter. “Has she been given medicine recently or something?” she whispered.

  He shrugged his ignorance. “I’ve been here for f ifteen minutes, and she hasn’t spoken yet.”

  Merry nodded and looked back at Tess. “I hear you had an interesting reaction to Del’s death,” she said carefully. “Under the circumstances, I can pretty well understand it. I can even see how you’d be happy she was dead.”

  Merry might have been talking to a mannequin, for all the response she drew.

  “I’m partly responsible for that, I suppose. That’s one reason I’m here. I suggested Rafe help Del out, as a friend. But you saw it differently, didn’t you? You think Del lured the man you love back into a world you don’t trust, and he seemed to like it there. And he was in no hurry to reassure you about what that meant. Your distance and your silence didn’t do a thing to keep him off the water, and in fact, they seemed to drive him further away and closer to Del. That must have been pretty threat­ening, Tess.”

  Merry paused—assessing how far she should go, Peter thought.

  “I mean, Del was a good ten years younger, and Portuguese to boot. It must have played on your worst fears. And instead of abandoning the whole business in order to save his relationship, Rafe decided to be macho and force you to accept his point of view. So you decided to work on Del, isn’t that right?”

  Tess shifted under the covers and looked full at Merry. Her eyes were devoid of expression, but her gaze was steady.

  “She got the f irst threatening letter two days after you f irst fought with Rafe. What did you do—walk out of the Brotherhood and fume all the way home? Think of all the things you’d say to Del Duarte if you just got the chance? Only a cat f ight would be demeaning, wouldn’t it, and hardly the sort of behavior for a middle-aged woman. Better to look cool and unconcerned. Beat Rafe at his own game. But Rafe didn’t call to apologize that night, and when he stopped by Saturday you warned him off the premises with a kitchen knife.”

  Tess’s head turned away.

  “You probably tossed and turned until midnight, thinking about the ring you’d thrown at his back, feeling remorse, feeling scared, feeling anger. I bet you got up at two in the morning and started leaf ing through magazines. Crazy ideas always seem logical to the sleep-deprived, don’t they?”

  The still form on the pillow moved; it might have been a nod.

  “‘Get out of town and take your brat with you,’” Merry said. “I started thinking about the tone of those notes after Rafe told me how worried he was. I’d assumed they were sent by whoever killed Del. But they sounded like the words of an angry woman—a woman who resented Del’s sexuality and youth and freedom, a woman who wanted her to disappear. Even the last one—‘The life you save may be your own’—had the predictability of a cliché.

  “They were like the threats a cheerleader would leave in a rival’s locker. What were you going to do when the notes failed, Tess? Egg and toilet-paper the front of her house?”

  Wincing at Merry’s harshness, Peter looked at the woman in the bed. He’d instinctively been gentle with Tess, fearing her fragile spirits, avoid­ing the outbreak of emotion he sensed was building.

  “She had no right,” Tess whispered. It was a dry and guttural sound. In the dimness of the shuttered room, Peter could not be sure that she was weeping, but he thought it likely from the break in her voice. He looked at Merry in alarm, but the detective was unmoved.

  “No right to take Rafe away from you.”

  “No right.”

  “And that made you hate her.”

  “I wanted to hurt her.”

  “Call her a slut, talk about her past, make her feel shame and anger and a desire to leave.”

  Tess nodded.

  “She didn’t take Rafe away from you,” Merry said. “Rafe loves you. He always will.”

  Something between a grunt and a snort emanated from the bed—a laugh, Peter realized. “Not after what I’ve done.”

  “Rafe won’t love you?”

  “Can’t.”

  “He liked to f ish with Del. But that’s over now, isn’t it? Because Del’s dead.”

  Tess was weeping in earnest, now.

  “Did you go to see her the night she died, Tess?”

  “Never saw her. Never—”

  “You never faced her in person, did you? Just through the patchwork notes, like a coward, unsigned and left at her door. Do you feel like a coward, Tess?”

  A shuddering sob. Tess turned her face to the pillow.

  “Did you kill Del?” Merry’s voice was very quiet, the words might almost have been unsaid.

  A pause, f illed with shaky breath. “I wanted her dead,” Tess said suddenly, clearly, raising her head from the pillow. “I wanted her dead. I’m glad she’s dead. I’m not sorry.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Merry said. “I think you’re so sorry she’s dead that you can’t get out of bed in the morning. Or the afternoon. I think you need Dr. John to help you live with how sorry you are, until you’ve had enough Valium to believe you’re not sorry at all. But wanting her dead isn’t the same thing as killing her, Tess. Even though you think it is.”

  She reached for Tess�
�s hand and pressed it, hard. “Stop feeling guilty about what you can’t help. Guilt won’t bring Del back. Guilt will only poison your life and accomplish your worst fear—it’ll drive Rafe away permanently. Admit that you got what you wanted, talk over your feel­ings with Rafe, and go on. That’s the only way to live with what’s worst in yourself.”

  “Won’t want to,” Tess whispered, slumping back into inertia again.

  “Rafe? Rafe won’t want to talk? You’re the most important thing in his life, Tess. He told me so himself.”

  Merry stood up and looked at Peter. He nodded once, and bent to kiss Tess on the cheek. She closed her eyes, the tears visible even to him, now, and turned away.

  “One last question,” Merry said. “Why the fancy signature, ‘The Avenging Angel,’ in italic script?”

  “I wanted her to know,” Tess said. “The sort of person she was dealing with.”

  “I see,” Merry said.

  Vanity, all is vanity, Peter thought. They left Tess where she lay.

  Chapter 21

  “Do you think that was the right thing to do?” Peter said, as he followed Merry down the stairs.

  “I don’t know,” she said frankly. “I haven’t the faintest. I f igured I’d just see how she reacted to my version of events. Maybe she’ll wake up and f ix dinner for Will tonight. Or maybe she’ll cut her wrists in the bathtub, and I’ll be the one devastated by guilt in the morning.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  She looked over her shoulder. “No. It might be worth sending Rafe over tomorrow morning, though. Just to see how she’s faring.”

  “I’d no idea Del was getting threatening letters.”